Well-lubricated by sangria and tapas-full, my best friend and I are standing outside a bank up north that’s shut down for the night. I’m bolstered— I want to rob it but heists take time. We’ve spent our last on some forbidden 27s as a compromise between her Parliaments and my Marb reds. Don’t tell anyone. It’s really, truly rare that we’ll allow it, and it never gets out of hand. In front of a floral mural rendered on the brick wall opposite the bank, she takes my picture. It reminds me that time is always racing in various shapes and configurations, and most importantly, whichever direction it goes— it doesn’t wait. It waits for no man at all. But some beautiful things can morph along with its passage— quick as a whip, what’s meant to stick around stays, even if in mourning or missing.
Yesterday evening, with his head near my heart, I said that all you can do is cling to people for dear life. That’s really all I know how to do. I have expressed to my therapist the delay in my brain between being spooked by displays of emotion and subsequently feeling empathy in the face of them. She typed quite a bit in response. But now, in my dim apartment, having lit that candle whose scent transports me to my air mattress that Field Work Term in Boston, my arms are around this person who I love and there’s no gap between processing and feeling and holding. It’s all swift and I mean every minute.
Before he got here, I prayed to God to make me a comfort. I have always desired for love to be transformative— in an ethical way, not making me unrecognizable but making me warmer, sweeter, committed to more solidarity, better able to wrap my arms around anyone in my life who may need it. Love (of all kinds) is doing a number on me.
The other day, my phone made a montage of pictures and videos of my littlest sister from when she was 2-3 ish. The music was funny, and picture after picture of her smelling flowers and ambling around and laughing and dancing passed over the screen. My primary reaction was finding the humor in it, yes— since I was a teacher, I have been intentional about not romanticizing the state of childhood. They feel their emotions as big as we do, their stakes are just as high, it’s all so relative. There are moments of high bliss and deep sorrow that shake their whole bodies, just like us. From the moment they’re born. And I know that I feel emotions like a child, that everything takes hold of me fully and shakes the hell out of me. And I’m so open to that, so open. Because after many years of diligently numbing myself, to be able to thaw has been an experience I am grateful for and was so close to missing out on.
There’s always a grief with the shiftings of the earth— tectonic or imperceptible. The woman who walks on the street outside my window with her umbrella to block the sun still has sun to block. Thank god. Even as the days shorten, there are still days, and there is abundant love to be given and received.
I don’t want to die without being full of it as much as possible. I mean I don’t want to die, which is its own sort of love, its own fullness. I’ve always been pretty joie de vivre even when everything in my life felt like it was weighing down on me— because there’s champagne to be drunk and airport kisses to be kissed and pictures to be archived and beauty to gawk at. Because yesterday lightning struck as soon as that percussion hit at the very beginning of “Little Red Corvette.” There is so much to behold. And I have lots of plans to beholding.
Here’s Hopkins:
Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
Here’s Prince:
You need a love that’s gonna last.