these dictums are saying you musn’t be this beast and something inside you goes to sleep. the strangest thing is that shame burrows into you like embers remembered when we are close, if we ever dare to be animal.
when I am alone, I submit to this burning shame, stoking those embers and the world feels hard, even my bed, and the walls, and my skin crawling and body somewhere just to my left. i ask myself, which way is up, not really knowing. what is it that one must do to be good, i ask myself as i still try to sit as still as humanly possible and not breathe, because breathing would cause harm, and being thirsty. i once asked my sister to stop breathing, because it was echoing in my ears like a thunderous rolling in and out and she laughed, which is good, because you need to breathe. or she needed to breathe, i didn’t, or couldn’t, or wasn’t allowed to.
i went to a festival once, and my friends made a tent with a kitchen, and they would make food there all day, with good coffee in the morning. i sat near the kitchen and without asking for anything. someone would hand me a salad, or a cup of coffee and i felt so thankful and so still. i sat there for all the daylight and into the night. one guy said hi to me in the morning and again after dusk and i had not moved from the very spot i was in. if i hadn’t grown roots, being so still, i might have died.
i once had appendicitis and i told my mom my stomach hurt before the sun went down and she said to wait to see how i felt in the morning. i laid down and put my hands on my stomach and waited, watching all night as the minutes passed by until i watched the sun come up again in my bedroom. i walked down the stairs and my mother said I was white as a ghost, and she took me to the hospital. i went to surgery in the middle of the night because my appendix was about to burst. that’s how good i am at waiting.
I waited all my life to get away and while i was waiting, i imagined what might exist or who i might be. in that stillness i found things waiting for me, like the grass, or birds, but only crazy people talk to grass, of course. it couldn’t have been the grass because grass doesn’t feel, they say, even though it does breathe.
sometimes it takes you longer than you could ever imagine to make something happen and even then, you never realize that it keeps happening and you are tumbling. i had an argument once with my partner. i was young, 23 i think. i told him that you could be flexible until you died and he said you couldn’t. i showed him a video of a 90-year-old man who was an acrobat and he changed his view to you could, but that it would be too hard. i wondered if it was a choice to be a spry and flexible old man or to become old, or whether it would be too hard.
everything is ultimately like everything else, it’s all implicated and that’s what i talk about, dots and waves. our conversations are like itty bitty suns. life seems to open to you to the extent you open to it, but to the sadness and the pain and the joy, which can sometimes be even more frightening. it’s like searing embers, touching you, burning you, making you see.
the metaphor of light is beautiful and airy until you realize that you get cataracts from the sun cooking the matter of your eyes like scrambled eggs. if you wait and feel, it seems, you can see such beautiful things blooming and rotting, hurting, loving, and dying. it’s amazing to be a part of that, is it?
what is it to be god? is it what feels good? is it what does good?
sometimes, i feel like i am along for the ride. waiting involves a lot of watching, without judgment. everything happens, doesn't it? like ripples on a stream, a face with these contours, and day and night, different due to light and darkness. the earth's shadow makes it colder. we trust the sun, every day.
there is too much that is mysterious about the world to decide things. say goodnight to the sun, if you can remember to. acknowledge the vast yawning emptiness of space, of everywhere that is not the sun. how incredible is it?
it’s like waiting, and goodness. the sky is not better because it's above the earth. sure, it's blue but you can’t build your house there. it’s a spectrum, sky, ground. it would be difficult to decide what is good. there are gradients and movements that reveal one thing and then another and in it, i watch it unfurl and tumble downwards like the ringlets of scroll, with everything that’s ever been written held in hands upwards towards the abyss.
anything but the infinite, please.
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