(no subject)

I most often write when I'm lonely and uncertain. I write when the only voice I trust is my own. I write when the alternative of silence is unbearable and when there is no one to listen.

Sometimes I write when I'm happy.

Always I write when I need an anchor, when the storm of my life threatens to blow me far enough away that I'm frightened of it. Love blows me away so hard and so fast that I write of it often.

There's a hollowing-out feeling before the words come. It starts between my floating ribs and crackles like electricity in the cavern behind them up to the bottom of my sternum. So often that feeling comes and I can't find words to release it and I wander through the next few hours hiding it behind my shields, preserving my vulnerable openness from anyone who looks at me in the flesh.

I'm afraid and unanchored tonight. I root myself in action; I find stability in momentum. When the next move is in someone else's hand it's like trying to balance on a bicycle without moving forward. Everything wobbles. I worry that I will fall. And I am so extraordinarily bad at it that even a couple days of waiting for someone else's move can take me apart.

I'm getting good at putting myself back together again. I'm getting good, too, at knowing that however I feel in the moment I *can* put myself back together again. This continual fracture and repair makes me tired, or maybe tonight it's just that I'm tired, but it adds depth to my experience of the world. Each crack is laced over others upon others until the pattern is so intricate that you can stare into it deeper and deeper.

I get lost staring into those patterns.

Oh, this is useless. Words aren't a release tonight. I'll leave you with Li-Young Lee.

This Room and Everything in It

Lie still now
while I prepare for my future,
certain hard days ahead,
when I’ll need what I know so clearly this moment.

I am making use
of the one thing I learned
of all the things my father tried to teach me:
the art of memory.

I am letting this room
and everything in it
stand for my ideas about love
and its difficulties.

I’ll let your love-cries,
those spacious notes
of a moment ago,
stand for distance.

Your scent,
that scent
of spice and a wound,
I’ll let stand for mystery.

Your sunken belly
is the daily cup
of milk I drank
as a boy before morning prayer.
The sun on the face
of the wall
is God, the face
I can’t see, my soul,

and so on, each thing
standing for a separate idea,
and those ideas forming the constellation
of my greater idea.
And one day, when I need
to tell myself something intelligent
about love,

I’ll close my eyes
and recall this room and everything in it:
My body is estrangement.
This desire, perfection.
Your closed eyes my extinction.
Now I’ve forgotten my
idea. The book
on the windowsill, riffled by wind . . .
the even-numbered pages are
the past, the odd-
numbered pages, the future.
The sun is
God, your body is milk . . .

useless, useless . . .
your cries are song, my body’s not me . . .
no good . . . my idea
has evaporated . . . your hair is time, your thighs are song . . .
it had something to do
with death . . . it had something
to do with love.

Li-Young Lee