April 6

Strange to come upon such vacant hours, such yawning, chasm-wide days that wait at my beck & call, or else stagnate & silence & wonder after my will. How quiet can menace me, make a reflex of guilt just as easily as appear the arena of productivity. Here I am in Alaska, where I chose to be, surrounded by a titillating landscape, literally thousands of miles from anything or anyone I know, & here, within the four walls of this cabin, that carriage I drew out from place to place, that same heft & weight, lies in wait for me. I have limned it so long, walked its periphery, glanced to its center time to time, maybe even rushed in headlong for a protracted moment here & there. Come to find my hours my own. Whittle into accountability. How easily I could weave my days of tentative deferrals, dissembled promises. Now the hours ask after my writing, after my emotional integrity, after my distractions, my fundamental reality. Are you pleased with how you’ve spent your day, they ask, its hours spent. Really, how are you faring? What precisely have you achieved, they badger. Well. A scale of minutiae, I say. What it took for me to build up & break down, to forge ahead, to swath the back of my hands across my eyes for lack of tissue, to arise & eat, to haul myself here in the first, my heart this sinking ship. Other days, other times, there is no triumph in these things, no small victory to proclaim. To war against what would envelope me, this little battle I wage & win, days. It is a quiet progress, an endurance, a self intrepid against itself, the shock of the present against a habituated past that clings, that takes firm hold, how the wake holds the cutting keel. Days, I say, how I am breathing into you. Now breathe into me.