as seen

Something happened today.

Right after I heard, 

I fumbled with the remote

And paced around the room

And felt a strange bodily shock

Even as my mind was stirring doubt.

Is that blood even real? 

Why is it so red? 

Why isn't there more of it? 

When he popped right back up and said

"Wait wait wait" 

And then pumped his first and mouthed the words

"Fight fight fight"

I shuddered at the suggestion

And wondered why

He'd only mouthed

The loudest part.

The world did not stop,

Not really.

Not like it did before 

There were so many ways

To see.

We moved along our day,

Redirected our hours to 

Our own private joys and tragedies

And watched something else on TV. 

what is happening

What is happening is Matthew in China is telling me about how his science class experiment got cancelled because a bunch of kids got sick from the fertilizer.

And the trees are just blossoming pink outside- last year it seemed to only last a week before summer arrived full-on, or at least the blooms were gone. 

Yesterday, Scream Queen classics were mentioned in a book I'm reading. Last night I dreamt I was being stalked by a killer. I've never even seen those films. 

And across the world there are unspeakable atrocities occurring that I am too gutless or boundaried to expose myself to,

But plenty are.

And there's an ALL CAPS multiple-posts-a-day frenzied number who are mad at me for caring so little and for carrying on so blythely and how dare I take a walk or piddle away hours on trash tv and how dare I NOT USE MY VOICE.

And right now I am telling Matthew he's a vocabulary superstar and great focus and do you want to use our last few minutes for vocabulary pictionary and it's ok, you can be the artist. I will just keep guessing. 

what you do

Looking at my own tooth in my own hand 

-A thing where it should not be-

On a night when I happen to be home alone

With no one to scream the shock to

Means whispering oh my god oh my god

Quietly

Staring at the small piece of glass

Then rushing to see the gaping hole where it used to be

Wondering when, exactly,

It stopped being me.

at the end of a tough year

I absorb sadness

(the soaking kind)

Like a sponge

Too full to wring

What is a little more

To add to the end of

An unfixed dripping

Tidal

Swing

Unanchored

Stream of months

Porous and poor

Another year

more comfort than courage

When it starts getting darker early

Layers and thicker socks

And by 7pm I'm ready to give in

Those liminal minutes

That feel like an actual pull

And my body feels heavy and far away

My mind deliciously blank

In those moments I am fearless

I am most ready

For nothing

years of it

Everyone got wider and a bunch of people got divorced and no one is really saying it in so many words but wow this has been a challenging decade and it's been awhile since anyone's felt especially hopeful and there's no real end in sight but we're too tired, now, to manage anxiety spirals so this mild depression can almost be mistaken for calm. 

bike camp

I went away to bike camp for the weekend where most everyone was either ten years older or ten years younger than me.

The older folks wanted to talk about bikes. The younger ones wanted to talk about AI and revolution. 

turn turn turn

first infection

while I was infected for the first time,

the world mostly kept on

while I mostly slept for hundreds of hours 

and took three days to finish a movie.

I read nothing meaningful and thought nothing important

and had no energy to care or worry about health or wellness at all

(except for a few anxiety spirals that sent me right to sleep).

a bunch of people got shot in America and 

artificial intelligence continued to advance at a rapid rate

and no one cared much or knew what to do if they did.

that's all.

more or less.

nostalgia

What a thing to crave- 

catastrophe.

When days shrink to surviving and little else. 

Congratulations due for getting through.

The simplicity was an odd, unexpected comfort. 

Whereas now, 

in some quiet in between or after,

the questions announce themselves again.

Regrets and wondering at purpose.

Looking in the mirror for the first time, maybe, in years.

Wasn't it somehow easier, then?

In surprising ways?

In 2020 when I saw no one and sang the Cranberries

Empty

in a hot shower twice a day.

Took two hour walks to get to a mailbox and 

swept up rollypollies, 

heaps of them dead at the door,

every morning.

I didn't feel old or complacent and

it wasn't a question of having settled 

or having lost my spark 

or much of anything related to a self at all.

I was nervous about the world,

alive in it,

and little else.

oh, to be

the panic, twice

It's been, what, a week or so now and it seems distant again-

unless I check the news.

Twice in the span of a few weeks,

looking down to see the words ACTIVE SHOOTER

alive on my phone.

Once was the first thing I saw in the morning,

and I stumbled out of the room mumbling about it in a hushed, incomprehensible tone, doom-scrolled for ten minutes before the picture became clear, and then promptly fell back asleep.

"What were you saying about his school?" he texted later.

"OMG" he replied.

Hoax.  

It had been a hoax phone call.  But the kids had been locked down and dismissed and they parents remained actively rattled.

The panic came back to me in strange ways throughout the day.  

Needing to pause to catch my breath at odd times.  Muscles tightened for no reason.

All that, and I was steps removed and an entire country away.

Imagine.

The second I was attempting to make my first carrot tartare,

carrots cooked and ready to be diced

chives and capers-

(the way I'd been craving capers-

just the thought could elicit a physical response)

and it was all coming together.  

But this time it was not a phone call

and there were real bodies emptied

and no followup outcome article

because the shooter was still at large

and people were hiding in their apartment showers

and new information was not being shared 

but conspiracies were all over screens

and in between dicing carrots I was 

refreshing my phone

and reaching out to a friend who worked at the site.

She was not at work, but home,

grinding egg shells for her worm compost

and exchanging frantic texts with me about

the strange disconnect of this

very domestic moment

in a terrifying world.

xmas

gosh the holidays hurt with expectation

hopes wrapped too tightly

santa is not real

not in the way we talk now

and no one has any idea what they are doing

and everyone's too busy to ask

wouldn't the magic

come more honestly

if it had less to do with

this

stuff

actual

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?

done

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

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.

waves

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?

dear diary

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.  

stop not

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.  

actually

 What do mothers and daughters talk about?

somehow

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?

subtraction

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

spring

 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.  

living

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.  

no ache no nothing

My god

How do any of us, actually?

There isn't time enough to 

Exist

Or to consider any of it adequately. 

Here we are.  Trudging forward

It flares up like a hemorrhoid now and then for years 

until finally, it's gone entirely.  

It is unfathomable. 

The need to have -

Gone

And arms feel light like wings,

Not empty.

why I'm crying today

Today I'm crying because I've never written a novel

and I likely won't start today.

What exactly am I grieving?

The loss of a potential that is still very much alive?

maybe the years have made me fearful

maybe the risk to try feels more intimidating somehow

maybe there is so much to grieve in the world

that this is just a very literal way to process

not knowing where to begin

endeavour

The Endeavour space capsule landed back on earth today

and I couldn't bring myself to care

and I couldn't stop crying.

I think I must have hit a depression bump, I tell him

and he looks at me sideways

and keeps chewing his food.

So here I am at the start of a new month

in a year that seems to be starting

to swallow me whole.