Sometimes I’m mostly just desperate to get us back home. Othertimes I wonder just what I mean by that. After all, everyone is here and they are playing every song I loved eight years ago on the radio.
He told me I was brilliant, and in the moment I was. I stood, feet on dry grass, and looked up at that blue September sky. The wind ran across the field and over my bones, whistling through spaces between ribs. My heart caught fire and burned out the last of the dark I held in my corners, light spilling out my fingers and knees and eyes.
In that moment I was empty, a room with no shadows; cleaned out for what new future, I do not know.
I’ve been harboring this sense of wrongness. I found its source today; there was a flickering, that metallic fluorescent light sound, and then, there it sat.
I never really figure anything out. I only seem to be able to find things already sitting in dark corners in my brain somewhere. I have this sense of clicking things already known or stored back into sudden awareness, like your brother’s birthday two days ago which you have just now remembered.
Today we put some seedlings into the earth and we cleared some ground and built things of whole wood - there’s something beautiful about a heft of true wood, pulled out of a tree and knotted and grained, if ‘to grain’ is a verb. We’ll say it is.
A neighbor walked past our waist-high wood fence; it’s fronted with the gasping, half-alive raspberry bushes we planted. This neighbor, a bandana wearer, long-hair haver, late-twenty something, raised his fist in a kind of cheer and just said, “Moral support. Welcome to the neighborhood.”
Somewhere in my bones, this is the thing I’ve always wanted.
Moving is beautiful and sad because you have to touch everything you own.
Pick it up and hold it and feel its shape and weight and mentally rate the likelihood it’ll smash at any given box-level; find the right paper to wrap it or folder to file it or drawer it really should have been in this whole time; remember where you got it and why you kept it and what the memory or function is worth to some imagined future self.
You do all this and you end up with these careful boxes of things you believed were important enough to have bothered with. Memories worth keeping.
Artifacts. Not of a former life, but of the day you put everything you owned in a box and decided this thing and that thing were worth the space in a truck.
I remembered this, yesterday:
We don’t have to be bound by the way things were before we got here.
There is something beautiful about this city. It has been rebuilt; Flowers out of concrete.
We’ll remake the world, you and I.
I always cry in airplanes.
Once, when I was very small, I stole duck eggs I had found under a park bench. I meant good things for them, but being small and forgetful, I left them hidden in the car. I found them weeks later, rotted and broken.
This is the first time I remember having a conscience.
I have never loved anyone like I love you.
It’s sharp, sometimes; air running over some long gash across my chest. Mostly it’s dull, though. It’s like the constant presence of a piece of clothing, the sensation staying mostly under conscious thought. It simply sits there, cloth on skin: this knowledge that, at least for today, I am not alone here.
Although, to be fair, I’ll tell you this: I am not the best namer of things. I once cured a thing I was calling anxiety with a pack of Tums. Turns out that sometimes that hollow aching under your ribs is stress, is fear, is danger. Other times, it’s just heartburn.