Kacper Niburski is a medical student in the Class of 2021 at McGill University

There are only a few bodies that I have touched fully and fumblingly: my mother’s, as a baby drawn to a life that spills kindness; my twin’s, as a faulty scanner realizing that meaning is not found in mirrors; my lovers’, who have known that fingers loiter like summer horizons when undressing the lightness of being. I’ve hugged big bodies, mountains of men and women. I’ve stretched to bodies that have slipped away, that have asked for my palms to leave. And I have felt the bodies that whispered into a night that saw everything that this is what it was all about — to hold and be held, to love and be loved.

Sometimes, in the steep silence after these uneven affairs, there are heartbeats. Tiny, repetitive things that almost seem too quiet to be, but are. There, under your nail. There, in my own now. They bumble braveness. They tickle familiar muscles and call like sunlit laughter. Against the unseen quiet, their sacredness spools out in a language older than language itself. ...continue reading →