I’ve been subsumed by the machinations of constantly adjusting o new and vital bits of information bout how to stay alive correctly. So much hypervigilance. I’ve pared myself down to core truths, and yet while I would think that place would prove ripe for material it’s somehow been the opposite. A skeleton has nowhere to carry a personality. A bicycle frame doesn’t go to parties.
I love antique glass, in deep blues and greens. I need the sun as much as I complain about it. Maybe more, if it’s physically possibl efor me to complain more.
I don’t trust easily anymore. I am less easily offended.
I assume that if we matter to one another we’ll mostly remember to reach out after big things happen, and sometimes even when they’re small things. I don’t tell myself I’m imagining things anymore. Or that I’m too sensitive. I trust my instincts, and usually these days the very first one is the right one.
I’ve been burned hollow by the world and by people. Where is my fighting spirit? This isn’t like me. Not like the person I was. I’m weary of fighting. Give me an easy conversation, a soft place to sit, a hug that could crack a walnut. Give me pleasure and joy in equally massive measures. (Give me Christ or give me Hiroshima, wrote Leonard Cohen, and I see his point.)
We’ve learned to do ten times the number of necessary chores in half the amount of time, and we don’t complain about it anymore. The children can hear. Our loved ones are watching. Where does it go, when we hide it away, spirit it into thin air? I’m learning that it takes up residence on the tops of our heads, swift and silent, compressing us. Eliminating the gaps. Soon our joints meet where there used to be space. We are bone on bone. We are machine. We remember pleasure. “That was so nice,” we say, politely.