Thoughts for a Rainy Day

Does the tide resent the moon?

Where I live feels haven and dungeon, replete with overwhelming and safety and comfort and disgust. I see opportunity and burden in each of my life, and when I sink I am surrounded by kind life rafts that scream my responsibility. I am struggling to understand gentle and must.

Maybe the world is bittersweet by nature, and contradiction our way of seeing clearly through the haze of choices that are obligations that are freedom are shackles are affection are resentment and wanting. Maybe clarity is a filter, showing us just one comforting truth of symbiotic parasitism, of the annihilation and reconstitution of a colony of moments.

It would be easier to say that the tides thrashes in resentment, or crests with passion. It's easier for the moon to glow lonely or shine fondly.

But, as their partnership has lasted for centuries, perhaps they have learned to see without a lens.

When you are looking for your glasses, you have to find them before you can see clearly enough to find your glasses. When you are losing your father, you need him to put his hand on your shoulder so you can see clearly enough to accept that he's gone. Only one of these can be replaced, but that's where the differences end. I'm still scrambling around a world that looks familiar but so different, like it's made of shadows and shimmering oil that begs to be lit on fire. I'm checking every shelf i keep my sense of normalcy. I'm searching under the hospital bed, where I dropped my breath when I saw you sleeping there. The world is darker, and scarier, and out of focus. Even when it is friendly, it's not right. And it can't - or won't- be right. Not ever.

I crawled into the bed and placed his hand on my shoulder myself. It was a compromise I never imagined making. I screamed and howled and cried in that primal way that you can feel in the marrow of your bones, and I felt his fingers tighten. Or maybe I didn't. But I have to believe in some way he was there, that he knew me even with limp dendrites, split axons, and a brain dry of neurotransmitters. He was pointing to my glasses. He was saying "here, this is how to see again. They're broken and bent, but I taught you how to mend them. I taught you well. You'll see again. And maybe you'll see the world through smudged lenses for awhile. But you will see. You will walk. And you will breathe."

it's not as if i see myself as paper

and you as flame

but that i see myself as paper

and you as flesh; i flinch

your soft hands

are so close to my sharpness

//

Hundreds of faces, leering not unkindly with those fantas-eyes. They lob promises of desirability underhand and echo one another in a cacophony that is not just carnal.

What kind of bond is made, staring at that face with your hand and genitals in firm matrimony? A species that can craft mirrors out of cats, out of screens, out of THINGS, surely ties themselves to the frozen moments in time they nearly fuck.

And when you refract and reflect back into the world, you exhale sulfur and sweat rose petals and this becomes a veil, a fine mist - a lens.

The word even sounds easy - two innocent e’s tucked so neatly between endcaps that it almost seems to rhyme with itself. The consonance is a promise of solace without malice.

in your mind you can picture a door made of a million strands of silk, seemingly blowing in every direction at once. There was a brilliant light behind it, and you smell sugar. The wind blows you back; you cannot enter.

think of a beautiful glazed archway of clay. It is warm inside, and there are blankets and locks. You are made of ice; you cannot enter.

Imagine a latticed gate of ivory; pure, pristine, but carved with golden retrievers. You smell old wood and cinnamon, and hear the distant call of a vacuum cleaner. You must look for the key, and it never found the top of your to-do list; you cannot enter.

There's a gap between you and the next door, and it's exhausting and boring and worrisome and it smells like nothing and rotted planks, it sounds like a emptiness and a stomach rumbling, and it feels like glass and needles.

I haven’t seen the inside of his room, but I picture a textbook doorstop greeting would-be visitors and a garbage can filled with granola bar wrappers. Scripts, bills, and notes are the names for that stack on his desk and I can’t imagine there was time to make the bed.

He talks as fast as he walks, down the street and back up it in the morning. His gait is punctuated with thank-you-for-understandings while he feeds his calendar another appointment, another engagement, another lunch with a friend almost too dusty to recognize as he teeters on the verge of chain-smoking opportunity.

You understand, then, that I took the rejection like news of a bad interview - it wasn’t the right time. It’s not in our best interest right now. We’re sure you’ll find one soon.

there’s a spinning that’s too hard to grasp rotations like a merry-go-round like a patrol it’s dizzying and full of headaches and stimulants.