Every Day for 23

I remember once, I crept across the bedroom floor and laughed when I realized I was naked and the blinds were open. He laughed and said they’d have to be looking hard to catch a glimpse. And I said, why wouldn’t you? I always look in house windows when I pass to see what is on tv. In San Francisco, I made up a story about the man across the street going on a date to meet his lover, and when we got back that evening, he was walking past his window, naked, to his lover. But we left for further south the next day, so I couldn’t look in to see what he watched on tv. 

On my drive, I was thinking about selective memory, and the things I choose not to remember. I don’t really remember much of being sick, or the pain. Really, it’s just the crisis points, the bits where I was in the hospital, waiting for the morphine to kick in. Or my ENT sticking a scalpel into my mouth. But I don’t really remember the everyday fact of the pain, the hunger, the constant state of tired. When I would talk to my therapist about the Ex, for a long time he tried to get me to talk about the difficult parts, the ones that I knew weren’t working, but I’d carefully avoid it. And, to be fair, I remember very little about it. But when I listen to certain songs and I get this feeling in my gut that just isn’t right, despite being past almost all of it

Tomorrow I’m going to wake up and go back to work after a vacation. And be there all day, start to finish. I am noncommittal to any emotion regarding the change. And there’s not much to say, really. When I do nothing, there is not really any language that could come out of it. I cooked dinner; the sauce would not thicken. I added flour although the recipe did not call for it. Apparently the flavor is stronger if it is powdered, but it does not taste as good. Minced will do. 

I think we’re all a little lost anyways. I’ve got to be a little odd to find something in there. I wandered to the other continent and a caught a little beautiful energy. The flame is quite still, except when her breath brushes over it and pushes the fibers of it away from her. We enter this space to feel really nurtured and loved.  She believes in these higher things, in these fluffy things, and it seems less foundational than the things I grew in. This higher self, this other thing; it’s just me again, I say.  I told her I’m so much better now. That I’m past crumbling. That I know how to avoid needing to heal. I told him it just felt like self-aggrandizing to say I was doing it for someone else. I’m selfish in my art: it’s just me and for me. What is she saying, she’s whispering so softly I can only hear the fricative vowels. Her lips hitting the p’s and the f’s, a soft crack in the back of her mouth for the k’s, breath escaping her teeth for s. If I put my hand hear, behind the flame, it is illuminated, and my breath does not disturb the flames. 

I really did break. And it is odd to be assembled again. And am I different? Am I more than previous selves had been? Am I whole again, or yet, or am I still forming? I suppose both must be true, as in all things. 

I had a whole series of wild goings on and busy things that provide a variety of excuses that mostly boil down to being too tired. I worked a lot, I drank a lot, and I slept a lot. I want you to understand, my life is usually dull and even, in a good sense. I want to be balanced, and I also want to be present. I think that I am starting to learn that to be present means to let loose here and there. I’ve never rebelled, never let myself go wild, and while I am sure I don’t want to entirely lose control, I do think it’s important for me to allow myself to pull away from the worry and just be.  “I accept this well intended energy.” I see this sparkling, strong energy. Multi-directional really, let’s just focus it in any way.  My dog sleeps with me, at the foot of my bed. When she sleeps deep enough, she starts to twitch and yelps a bit as she dreams.Perhaps I do the same when I sleep deep enough.

Earlier in the day, my father finished cleaning out the mess that was left behind from removing the grain bins on our property. Beneath the dryer bin was left a 6 inch layer of rotting grain, animal feces, and a few animal corpses. He said it didn’t really smell bad, it just smelled musty and damp. But the mixture of it clung to everything: to his shoes, to his legs, to the cart that he used to haul it away into the woods, and onto the cement slab that was the base of the entire grain bin. He said he found just the one full skeleton, probably of a raccoon, and several skulls in the rest of the mess. When it was all gone, the cement slab that was left looked like a stage. I told him we could put on productions, call it theatre in the round. The great rural farm company. Or something or other. We’ll put on Shakespeare were the woodchucks used to come and go in their abandoned corrugated metal condominiums.

Today I was thinking about how we can only really understand our own tragedies and hope to connect to others enough to just barely empathize. I can cry about my boyfriend leaving me, and I can cry about Orlando because in some very abstract way, loss is all the same. It’s really just a matter of whom it affects. And I promise I don’t say that to diminish anything. I’m sure at some point those people in that club had cried over a lover and felt that the world was ripped apart. And now they must feel that the world is ripped apart again, but in another way. We must feel for each other because we can never become each other. All I really want is to make myself feel as though I could be absorbed into someone else again, but perhaps that is because I did it the very wrong way the last time. I wanted to be absorbed into him, but he didn’t want to be absorbed into me, and so mostly I was just pressing my body up against a brick wall and hoping that my skin would be porous enough for it to pass through me. In retrospect, that seems very sad. But so do all things in retrospect. Or the sad things. But I suppose that’s not particularly surprising or insightful. I used to really have trouble connecting to people, and I think it was because I thought that I was meant to be alone. That I was the solitary sort of person and I didn’t feel things anyways. The past year I learned that I was so afraid of my own emotions that I taught myself to believe that I wasn’t feeling them. And that made a mess of me. It’s important to acknowledge your own feelings. Sometimes they are not always valid or equal to the situation, but they still exist, even if you don’t want them. It’s important to see yourself as you are in the moment so that you have any capability of amending for the future. Otherwise the present remains perpetually static and that is such an epic waste of time. And one should never waste time. Really, it’s the only thing we have, besides language that is.

On the drive home, the lightning bugs (or fireflies, whichever nomenclature you prefer) were rising over the field of wheat just beginning to sprout up and behind me, there was a flash of lightning in the air.  It felt right to me somehow, like my observation of it validated itself in observing. And this is a thing I have struggled with, because I don’t feel present enough to be able to apply language to my experiences. They don’t feel real enough. I joke sometimes about how nothing is real, but I joke about it because it is a feeling that makes me feel so trapped inside my own self. It’s that mixture of things where I am both god and nothing at all, which I suppose is a poetic enough experience, but in my limited experience, poetic experiences rarely lead to good poetry. Perhaps I’ve just learned that language is for the mundane things. Words are built on active objects and to disassociate them with the objective is to pull them from any meaning they had anyways.  I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the opening of the book of John in the Bible, the part where, “In the beginning was the word and the word was with god, and the word was god. The same was in the beginning with god.” And the part of me that likes to get pulled away into poetic things, wants to pull the construct of god that I’ve learned through my upbringing out of that idea and just see word and god. To see them as one thing. And that’s where I get on this idea of being god. Because I can say a word and bring that thing into being, even if it is just in my mind. I say, “let there be light” and there’s light in my head, or I see it from the light bulbs above me. And this is all grandiose and frankly heretical, that I really want to pull away from it and say that I’m thinking too big, I need to keep it small and let myself experience all of it more presently. I’m not present enough. As I was watching the fireflies and seeing the lightning in my rear view mirror and few cars drove past. I realized after they passed that I had left my brights on and probably blinded them. but I was so caught up in whatever I was seeing that I didn’t even think about the fact that I was driving. Dangerous, I know, but only just. There wasn’t much more to see after that. It was dark out, so only the things that my lights fell on could be observed, and that fell mainly to the road, or the kitten that darted out in front of me that I was in no danger of hitting, but could only see because its eyes reflected the lights off my car. I made out the dark outline as I drove past it and placed it as a cat, although I suppose that it could have been a raccoon or an opossum. Both of these are more likely answers, given the time of day.

Not all things should be understood.