How hard it is to kick the tires on the tongue and let the words run and take you wherever it is deep someplace you’ve been thinking of, or dreaming of, or imagining, or dreading, see that’s really it, isn’t it, the duality of it all, the brutality and tenderness of the thing wrapped and cloaked in the filmy residue of becoming. Pull the perspective back and the frame out, but it’s so hard to do so when there is so much pain in each frame, that pulling back only emphasizes just how much is there in the first place, just how much hurt there is floating in the ether, a scorpion tail poised, a fire ant hill under the leaves. I am interested in the way we wound each other and I am interested in the way we each deal with those wounds, but I am not yet interested in forgiveness or crossing the bridge to the other side, I still am drawn to the funk and pull of the swamp. I think pain takes on angles and makes us all more beautiful, but is what why I keep diving into it more, deepening the line between the polarities, a cleaving in the chest you only really feel when a life threshold is there and permanence waits on the other side. See, there are some things you can’t go back to and some choices that when you make them, you close certain futures forever. I have ambition, or did, but it was direction I allowed myself to be pulled in, letting my waterlogged compass soak in the orange, allowing the river of choice to overtake my boat. For a long time, and even now, I’m afraid to lay claim to or place ownership over things because they can then be loss. An item once named is an item grieved. Marriage even feels like this. Like I have officially told the universe, this is my love, my heart outside my body, this is how you can hurt me deepest. And I wait for the hurt, the shoe, the tearing, the cleaving, the absolute shattering of enjoying with gratitude what today is and knowing a day may come where things could be different, harder, a loss entirely. But I have to tell myself that there is abundance here, there is joy, there is much love and wonder to be felt, and that to live in scarcity is to invite more of it, a reunion of bumbling mishaps and deeper, darker accidents that, upon reflection, don’t feel that accidental.
The lamp’s always on
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