Honey Honey

We open each meeting by asking a simple question: What is keeping you alive today? This allows us to revel in the sometimes small motions that get us to the Next Thing. Yes, I did not want to get out of bed this morning, but there was one single long shard of sunlight that stumbled in through a tear in my curtains, and the warmth of it hitting my arm got me to that first hour of living. There was my dog, who, on the mornings I do not want to get out of bed, will rest silently at my feet and wait for me to slowly emerge from under the covers, and seeing her reminds me that I do, in fact, have only one lifetime in which I can love this animal. As far as I know, we will love each other only here, for a while, and that is worth seeing what I can make out of a few hours, even when I’m wrecked with despair.

[ID: poem text reading,

Oh, to be ravaged by loneliness. By its soft, malleable teeth. A slow death. A slow ravaging. More like being pulled apart than eaten. You used to beg God for this at night, used to beg him to make you small enough to get picked up in something’s mouth and then swallowed. You used to bend your shadow into something worth slicing through, into something that deserved to be pried open. What you didn’t know was that nothing that wanted you had claws.

[ID. A poem titled 'I have to tell you', by Dorothea Grossman. It reads:

Yes, there is a place…where someone loves you both before…and after they learn what you are.