One in a Million

by Christen Lee


You, my dear, are one in a million
amongst this city of faces
cascading in all directions.
And I am but one drop in a rising ocean
fading to blue.

God knows I’ve been here before,
and I’ve been one hundred different versions
of you,
blending in one hundred different directions
like you,
but I have grown weary
of teeming streets and rising tides,
of dogged time and sleepless nights.
I’m not the same person
who walked these roads twenty years before.

I come to the city to find myself
within the loud mosaic,
to find my footing
like a Foucault pendulum swinging up and down
but never in a straight line.

My mind is a fury
once full of possibility,
but with age there is a narrowing,
a certainty of place.

This city of 2.6 million
has already named me
and I’ve only just stepped foot
into a storied past.

Call me mother, middle-aged,
midwesterner, dreamer,
something that can surface in this sea of beings
where I was once childless, child,
unsettled, unsure.

Here there are a million shops
selling promises that glow like gold
but I promise to never sell my soul
for want
when all I really want is to want less.
You see,
the less I want,
the more I have to give.

So I plant my love in the ones
who are born of all my possibilities,
the ones in a million
whom I call home.


* * * * *

Christen Lee is a family nurse practitioner in Cleveland, Ohio. Her writing has been featured in the Literary Cleveland’s Voices from the Edge Anthology, Rue Scribe, The Write Launch, Aurora, Humans of the World Blog, Sad Girls Club, 2022 New Generation Beats Anthology, Wingless Dreamer and is forthcoming in The Voices of Real 7 Compilation.