November 18th, 2014

There are some children that aren't really children at all, they are pillars of flame that burn everything they touch and there are some children who are just pillars of ash and they fall apart when you touch them said Sherman Alexie through a character in Smoke Signals and I am shaking with sobs in a down vest that must have been my fathers. It is too big on the shoulders and too tight on the chest and as my body trembles the huge shoulders rise and meet the edge of hair and graze my jawline so the sobbing becomes corrugated sound, like a salt shaker, like tiny pieces of ice falling at different pitches. I dream of South Dakota and skies like blankets. I dream of the wholeness of pitted city streets. This is the second day in a row I have called out. I am not well. The mind, which is eternal wants what is eternal. The hand, which is ephemeral, wants work it can finish. These two fates are ours as humans; we cannot choose one over the other. For the first time in weeks I feel happiness while scrubbing the shower walls of dead skin I've shed, but if I did only this my mind would ache like an old tooth. How everything here in the divided room of this world endeavors to disconnect us from ourselves and still we are expected to illumine! What is a light bulb without the socket!? I do not expect to survive this life, but I do expect what life I live to be alive.