posts culled from other sites and brought here
What I need and want to write about these days is not our best china, put out only for company. It is vacuous, dropped sentence-ridden, whirling dervishes, mean and sad, and hopeful and bracing. It is Maria at the start of the Sound of Music, just feeling herself in the air. Both the good and the ill in equal measure.
Aloneness is not weakness or bravery. It just is. It is a state of self that exists in me now regardless of how many people I share a room or a drink with. It exists in me even when I share and recognize it in others. Even beyond logic. I often crave it even as I’m experiencing it.
So mad they have chase me, they have to catch me, hold me down to screw my jaws shut and then I want to scream so hard I pull the wires apart like some kind of maniac. Break out of there like metal is paper. Like Aeolian gusts are taking hold of my throat. Banshees’ll need earplugs. Like I want to break out of a straitjacket and roam the streets howling and kicking soft things in their faces.
It feels somehow, at 11:30 p.m. like you are sitting on the day’s windowsill as the earthly set designers change the scenes around you. Draw in a tree and drape blue and purple leaves on its arms, pull out a curtain of evening sky and stud it with zirconia, paint the middle distance until it pulls the eye into infinity.
I explained to the assembled crowd of family that we could call him Tag…for now. He was a very sweet, almost plasticine baby that glowed ever so slightly like you could only see him through a gauzy, soft focus lens. A baby Jesus-y looking baby. I showed him to my aunt, and her delight with me and this squirmy little thing all swaddled up in dish towels still gives me the shivers half a day later. I showed it to my grandfather and he was just as happy. Everyone seemed fine with the fact that I would turn up with a kid. Everyone seemed beyond fine…delighted.
I just have to get back into the groove. Of everything. So the gross details of my absence are thus: I think I haven’t thrown…
And they, with delicate hands so very rarely seen and never thanked or held, clear away the silver pudding skin of time and throw all of that delicious stuff, the umami of the spirit, the meat that makes a man from a mouse, a woman from a whisper, back in the pot of what might yet be.
I don’t know why I can still feel you here, why I still observe the calendar with some urgency as if we are approaching anniversaries where we would surely need to meet and celebrate. Me in my horrible dress, you in that wrecked shirt. I give you up to the wind and the earth draws you back and spits you into my path. This is no great destiny, but you gave me comfort and purpose once.
Those voices in your head: not all of them are wrong, and on a hard night running, one of them is willing to take charge for a minute and help you power through. Life is so dismal these days. It isn’t bad to sometimes let it work for you.
But I used to be a horse and what it is to run along the water with all of yourself is what it is to live. There’s no metal in your mouth, no guiding hand at your cheek, no bag of sugar cubes or praise for your learned docility. You can pretend you forget what it is to live, but it’s just that, pretend.