sometimes you commit to a pattern and then the beat doesn’t go as planned. you don’t follow the rhythm of intended pacing, and the days stretch long and full but sans the things you had intended them for.
the dispatch feels thin this week, not for lack of a big life…perhaps because of it there’s a way in which things strangely circulate and you take a breath in and it comes full circle. you exhale. it is relief. you exhale. it is release. you exhale. it is the beginning of the next thing you want to say.
what i want to say (adapted from letter to self free-write exercise, sent to 2020):
you wanted to be held so much with the force of something bigger (and maybe) better than you. you’ve been thinking about how to grow alongside the size of the world you are coming to. this won’t be anything like you think it is. it is better but so hard. you are still looking for ground. for land to light on. language to live in. body to move with although it has been coming and it has also been here. it was already here you just needed to know.
back then you traded one thing for a nebulous possibility—more space, a gamble, some desperation. there was no good you expected; you merely ate the cost. quietly and yet with a fuss. you thought maybe you wouldn’t make it to happy. to content. to quiet without the nerves of your body twisting like tree roots clenching the soil.
more accidental footage shot on my phone today, from who knows when about who knows what.
Answer one of Bhanu Kapil’s questions from The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers.
what do you remember about the earth?
what i said:
it was a field of yellow and then a field of white. justine said, “my hip hurt for days.” the centipede i flung off the balcony. mikey said it was an “apex predator. apex predator".” Joanne presented on bamboo bats and i laughed at the dryness of scientific paper titles. there was also the smell of rain on concrete and its sound. on tree leaves. against compost.
funghi. funghi. funghi.
the dirt under my nail and the salt in my hair. the sand in my knee pit and heat rash. heat rash. heat rash. did i dare hug the ground with my bare feet? would it make me whole?
fibres, paper technology, the way things travel. what are borders and where are the flyways? all we have is the story we tell from the aftermath. all we know is the echo. even when the wind whips earth into ur eyes, what we leave behind is the story of blindness and its affect. all we remember is that the earth was once here. here in here. here around here. here of here. here about here. earth has its own knowledge and memory we know nothing of even if we pretend otherwise.
i prefer to respect the gap this way. in awe and wonder. through stories that never make it to record. the failure of witness.
II ii
I have to think again what it means that I am here,
what it means that this, harsh as it is and without
a name, can swallow me up. I have to think how I
am here, so eaten up and frayed, a life that I was
supposed to finish by making something of it
not regularly made, where I am not this woman
fastened to this ugly and disappointing world.
I wanted it for me, to burst my brain and leap a distance
and all I have are these hoarse words that still owe
this life and all I’ll be is tied to this century and waiting
without a knife or courage and still these same words
strapped to my back
Dionne Brand, from Land to Light On