People were here that aren't now.
Celeste.
Theresa.
Who knows the names to come.
I remember a cacophony of gentle and unkind things I thought and said at times- thinking we would go on being people together forever I suppose. The beauty I witnessed in them. The things I judged. The weight of that now. How heavy the petty can be.
It's just not time yet.
What is any of this, actually?
I need to tell you something in a hushed tone
about the man in the wheelchair
with only one shoe
hunched over
openly weeping in the rain
and how I walked by him.
What do we do? What can we do?
How is it that a whole crowd of us can stand and wait for the light to change and pretend not to notice a human being openly weeping only ten feet away?
What must it feel like to be the person in that chair- invisible. Worse than invisible.
And at the same time-
What can be done? What could I possibly do? And if I started doing something, would it ever end?
When it's very cold outside
but warm inside
and I'm a little bit sad
but safe.
That's my favorite part of living.
did that happen?
did I almost drown in the ocean,
unaware that I was at risk
until the lifeguard was swimming toward me?
do all of the contents of your life feel more and more like this as you get older? like a story that happened to someone else. like a scene from a movie, remembered hazily? near death experiences remembered apatheicaly through a fog.
where does it go-
the feeling of living?
Sometimes when I'm writing something,
a letter or a text or a post or a newsletter that only like 10 people read,
I think "what if something happened to me and these are the last words that people would scrutinize and dwell on, reading them over and mining for great meaning in every possible symbol and sign?"
Then I remember that my mom, after watching Ladybird with me, didn't see us there at all. Instead, the whole thing reminded her of her and grandma. Missing the point entirely.
(or did she? It hardly matters. I can still feel my quiet, resigned disappointment at her reaction- twisted like a dull knife)
I guess the point is, there's no guarantee that anyone in this life will actually understand you. Not even if you share blood or a roof or trauma or years.
Sometimes- most times- you're just writing for yourself.
What if, instead of becoming paralyzed whenever I think of starting to write more again, what if I just stop not writing? For some of the most important years of my life, I couldn't help but document. The need hasn't gone anywhere. It's been channeled and diffused, but I still feel compelled to slow living down in order to look at it and mold it... to see it instead of just experiencing it. What if I got myself a little notebook? The physicality of those little notebooks might have been the link that kept me red blood alive.
When I considered the disconnect between me and mom the other day (moments before drifting off, naturally), I felt a flash of fear that maybe she would give or throw away the crate of my journals and diaries that have been kept in her basemen for twenty years. She's hinted at what a nuisance my storage has been for nearly as long... and has even given some of my old things away without asking. Who's to say someday it wouldn't be my journals... in a fit of spite or daffiness or who knows what asinine reason there might be. She believes in Qanon doctors, for chrissakes.
At this moment, I feel more urgency to recover those journals more than I feel the need to build any bridge across the enormous gap that exists between the two alternate realities mom and I exist it.
When it starts to announce itself
it is almost as if remembering an absence.
It's startling really. Stops you like a head cold.
oh yes, that's right-
there is no point
An absolute miracle
and utterly meaningless
and we balance both, somehow.
All this filling of days and
charting of paths-
visions-
finding people and letting them go-
giving things away only to wonder where they went-
and none of it able to withstand the force
of one natural disaster
or nasty cancer
or coincidental encounter with a violent lunatic.
At the same time,
the idea of its going-
that there is only one of every day
and that there are only so many days to experience at all.
It's enough to celebrate and enough to mourn,
enough to feel something-
even to imagine
a point or a choice.
depressed or devastated?
what day is today?
sometimes I get angry all over again
even now
waking up in the middle of the night with the thought
*thousands of dollars*
like a heart gasp
the thought that the pattern happened more than once
the shame in generosity
the way holding someone else's hand meant I could never get ahead
the way the man who read my palm, voluntarily, at the corner store
knew and warmed me, even
and still
my heart is a calculator who will wake me up at night
to tell me something isn't right
years, even a decade, after the subtraction
There are these little flashes-
some temporary vision of what enormous joy and dread it is to be human.
A glimpse at your own capacity-
or the crushing weight of clear scenes from paths you never took -
people you never became-
commitments never kept or made at all.
And it is only a moment and at times even that feels too much.
And then the intensity will lift, just as suddenly, and you'll have a hard time recalling what it was that had you on the verge of tears in the middle of the afternoon over a month ago.
What is it like to be alive?
Left with impressions, mainly.
Staring out the window of a bus.
The smell of laundry by the side of the house.
Grandma's hands, coloring in circles.
We encounter dozens of world views and philosophies throughout our life. Most of us end up settling into the one we were raised with, or something somewhere in the neighborhood. Defined, eventually, by the ways we stray and the ways we stay.
We spend the first third focused on our own personal and immediate dramas, unaware of a wider world, no thought to roots from which we'd sprung. We spend our middles over thinking and fretting over everything- turning over awkward things spoken years ago and weighed down by some feeling of never quite being able to do enough. Eventually we return to our small worlds again, concerned only with our own daily acts of living and surviving and remembering and forgetting.
