February 20th, 2014


Slowly, like a drawbridge declining, this day will take back its meaning. Let us clarify: we do not mean we wish the memory to be dead, only that it is. This is a lesson I have had a hard time learning: that something is doesn't make it right. That something ceases to be doesn't mean it shouldn't have been. Do you know what it's like to lose something to irreversibility? No, not a breakup, dammit, a death. No, that is not a kind of death. It is nothing of the sort. You will know when you know, and there is only one door through which you may approach this truth. This is the last of it, the death tremors, I said today, and the only lie is that today has been empty. The death tremors visited me last night. There is a loaf of bread, a knife, some cheese, blackberries, and wine on my bedroom floor,
because despite, or because of, the pain of this illness, I wanted a glass of red wine. Let it be a symbol and a metaphor both, and a reminder of why we are where we are. You have very little of my mind now, and those parts in which you used to live I have learned to be very honorable with. This is just how it must be because I know too much of doorways and their irrevocable translation. There is more than splinters and warped wood, there is the leaning on the only sureness you know and staring into a new life: an unmooring under a sky of endless dark and invisible, distant stars.



February 19th, 2014

And now I see as one whose wet new eyes are just tightening in focus, that I hunger
for things for which I do not yet have an appetite. I utter words I don't know in a low
tone within myself as mist over a field of snow. Inside me the emptiness is just now
beginning to form itself into an outline for which I know no shape to fill. I am weak
and ravenous and full and very, very, strong. I am indestructible. I have become destroyer
of worlds, and only now, looking through piles of time to the first moment when destruction
was in our reach, have I become human. I hope I meet another of my kind. It is lonely
walking this earth with the weight of fallibility and disorder. It wears out my shoes and
all the cobblers have gone away for lunch forever and ever more. All we wanted to be are
structurelss clouds that break open over the hill and I, we even, all fall down as the water
rushes. If I must be the wandering human or the rushing water, I will choose neither
and ask to be the cracking earth that waits for both the human and the water, because the
only guarantee is that both will come, and in abundance. I have not been here very long
and my skin still burns in the sun, my lungs in the air, my eyes in the light.