#also arguably

Freakishly tall bird Grian

a thing that is consistently true is that the more connected i am to girlfriend, the more urgent it feels to me that we remain connected? but if we go for a while without talking i start to recenter in myself and find an equilibrium, and then i feel almost reluctant to reëngage: not because i think i’ll have stopped liking interacting with her, but because i know i will like it, and i almost don’t want to let myself remember the feeling of liking and wanting it so much, because it makes it hard to go on as my own separate unit, you know? whereas she i think gets overwhelmed and overloaded if we’re too close, but given time and space will reliably come to miss me and reach out to me again. and our relationship is a long delicate dance of balancing those two pulls, diastole and systole the rhythm / of our unbound bonding, to have / and not to hold. or to skip back earlier in that poem: it pesters to remember / the lover who is not in the bed, / to hold back what is owed to the work / that gutters like a candle in a cave / without air, where of course the work is the work of building a life for myself that serves both me and the world, and which like that candle is so easily smothered…

and like. idk. what’s my point. yeah that’s different from the question of whether mary oliver’s work is Inherently Poignant or just digestably sweet. but like. if the feeling of discernment that leads you to disdain it doesn’t also lead you to cut the sweetness of the patisserie with a coffee then. are you really in fact as much of a connoisseur as you pride yrself on being, i guess is where i end up with it