Once a week, I take down my spanish moss (from its window hook) for a water bath. The leaves are fuzzy between my fingertips and I let them sink into themselves, drinking somewhere beyond my consciousness, slow and quiet.
Sometimes as the day turns over, the incense is lit; the CD is played. Sometimes toes are stretched and rubbed comfortingly into linen. Other times the dishes are stacked and addressed. The latte at Neo is ordered and drunk. Always the bunnies are fed and petted. Always these teeth are brushed. Always, the shoulders stretch out. Every day, some things have to be faced.
Two years ago, I made some decisions that nudged my life down a new pathway. Two years later, I am still sorting out how to carry the weight of those choices with appropriate grace. I never imagined the aftermath to be easy. Still, the difficulty of certain lessons I’ve had to swallow are unexpected. Ones that emerge when your convictions about yourself fracture into shards. Ones you curse at when you cut yourself picking those pieces up.
And so I learn that it is difficult to care for myself in the ways I need: against debilitating anxiety, against the day’s weather system and its mirror to my feelings, against the erosion by time of things I thought sturdy and reliable.
Furthermore, this body is so demanding. It has so many needs. I am so tired some days, just trying to keep up with its maintenance, let alone nurturing more capacity for care. On other days though, answering this body’s needs, one at a time, strenuously and habitually, is a path through the darkness — a certainty to rely on. Like clockwork, I will be thirsty again. Eventually, I must get up to pee. Despite heartbreak; despite grievance, despite anger or resignation. How dependable. How despairing.
A question, “Am I this body, or does this body get in the way of me?”
“Enough of bosom and bud, skin and god
not forgetting and star bodies and frozen birds,
enough of the will to go on and not go on or how
a certain light does a certain thing, enough
of the kneeling and the rising and the looking
inward and the looking up”
- Ada Limón, from “The End of Poetry”
Conflicted letters to my body aside, I have been in dialogue with a deluge of questions, and they demand of me an exacting presence with myself. I feel the world stretched to fullness in my chest when this happens, and then I have to hold my face in my hands to sob. Strangely, this may be the most prayerful I have ever been.
A friend recently said, “Life is so long” and this sentence sat in my chest for a while. It comes to my attention that, since losing my friend in 2018, I may have been living as if tomorrow is the last one I have. Every morning I wake up and my heart hardens with this conviction dense enough to break, powerful enough to propel; rinse and repeat.
I don’t blame myself. The happening of some things break you forever and this is one of them. I don’t think I am mistaken either. Life is not that long. Anyway. It’s been a while though since I’ve permitted myself to consider other parallel possibilities.
More questions: What does it mean to have more time? What does it mean to have time in abundance? What will I do when that abundant stretch of time brings a series of further losses? Will I ever be able to stop having to pick up pieces?
Also, what does a person have to go through, to become a person?
My tears tend to surprise me, arriving without notice, signalling that I have, in fact, been moved. Most recently, they illuminated a full-bodied relief that I am, in fact, still enamoured by writing. This bone-deep shrieking love for words. Their perpetual hold over my thoughts and my heart. This word. This world. The taste of a whole season on my tongue. Words make me feel so small and alive.
“Enough of can you see me, can you hear me, enough
I am human, enough I am alone and I am desperate,
enough of the animal saving me, enough of the high
water, enough sorrow, enough of the air and its ease,
I am asking you to touch me.
- Ada Limón, from The End of Poetry
If it is not obvious yet, this is a catalogue of some ways I am working to keep joy close. Here are things I have not been able to fit into the logic of a paragraph: day naps in the kotatsu and my waking disorientation / vacuuming in the mornings / peeled mandarin oranges and their tangy haunting / words whispered to make light and to make soft / strength available to make full the present of my life. etcetera. etcetera.
We are such clumsy things. Weaker than we could ever anticipate, tougher than we could ever imagine. So in need to be touched and loved and told. I say to myself, “There will be higher highs. There will be lower lows. Holy Fuck. Can I make it to the end? Will there be anyone there with me?”
These things wash over my body like a rising headwind as I run to throw myself off the cliffs of my life, if only, to know for a split second, what it means to have no further doubt. Strangely, this is what I might call “joy” in this season — a defiant scream. some uncontrollable sobbing. the sink now empty because dishes were finally washed.