Breaking Stride

(warmth and cold as belonging and rejection – the system of order by rule-making and obedience)

How can I explain my relief at restored order? Dishes done and plants watered. No judgments to be made. How good I feel when there are no questions skulking at the back of my tongue about what is expected. Little hushing words breathe forward like curtains in summer, then rest, rewarded, at the edge of me.

To me, stark questions have always been a form of grace. The bareness of their structure and how little there is to translate. No matter their effect, stark questions are a form of grace. Cautious ones have too many means to an answer. Where to begin? Like milk that’s been sitting too long, growing a penetrable skin, but the point of entry is muddled. Where to begin?

As I think of a starting place, soap bubbles burst in the warmth of my kitchen. It is that quiet. I am living on borrowed moments, sleek trust. It will do. I have things to be thankful for, that much I have learned. I just don’t remember what they are. I could drown in you and still be afraid. The burden of shelter, words creating shelter. We plant these gardens of circumstance and wade into trembling with tremendous bravery.

There is no time to dress up the truth, it’s too cold out there. It’s like a threat encroaching. There are rules to this kind of winter that must be observed, a deeper vulnerability to chaos. Chaos brought forward by this bone-quaking. Winter is a thing to brace against, a structure that forms itself in the quiet of night. Something safe and palpable. Warmth becomes an oasis seen through the quivering exhaust that blurs good sight, an island you get to and exhale. There is a certain nationalism to this desire for shelter, and we will all, at one time or another, bend to it gladly.

There is nothing wrong with it, in any case. The yearning for a Texan kind of belonging: tipped hats and first names, the same land to grow on. How’s your mom? We are lost to the time when the idea of roots became so abstract, a metaphor for something other than the woody structure that keeps you from drifting. It’s best, in any case, to admit the yearning because masks do not stretch that far. And lying leaves a stench on the skin. Sniff and you can sense it - something is not right here. Scaffolding of buildings with bricks falling far below.

My days aren’t filled with music. I’m thinking and there is a lot to do. I stumble through silence in a kind of blindness, seeing too much from depths I don’t comprehend. I forget and remember all the time what it is that I think and where I need to be. Wispy suggestions blur at the front of my eyes and I strain to see, but it’s too close. Forgetting is as gentle a habit as breathing. And as kind.

I see my sadness as a form of amnesia, protective. Where have I gone in those generous moments when my eyes clear and I am no one, nowhere? I wish I knew. I’m at once in the past and the future and cannot sustain time as it passes, only what is known and what is not. None of this in between. The past and the future know how to belong to the truth. Never mind that one is theoretical and the other is a play between memory and imagination. There’s nothing to do now but pick the lint off my sweater and wonder if you love me. I thought I had lost you. Maybe I had.

I wonder where the souls go who, in some shock or horror that only grows inside skin that is not allowed to breathe, tolerate that sealing off and lay defeated in living flesh. It takes a long memory to pretend. Or perhaps it requires no memory at all – the past and the future absent of presence, and all things decided. Strange ramparts hide the trembling mess. Good fences make good neighbours.