i'll let you know when i get there

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

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...

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

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?