i'll let you know when i get there

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 somed...

 What do mothers and daughters talk about?

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.