Last Few Days

I don’t feel like writing. I don’t feel like sharing anything with a page, or a person, or the world at all. I want instead to recede from it a while, the way a wave in pulling back from shore unwaves, loses form, is subsumed & plunged into the latency again. Not divested, not really, just relieved for a time, before inexorably gathering itself anew for acquaintance with another shoreline, another sand. I’d like that thoughtless churning, I think, limbs fluid like tendrils of leaves, nothing in the ear but the surge & swell of a force beyond me. But I am here, acutely aware instead of every claim the world has on me, enervated & preferring not to but doing so anyway. Living, after all. Which is enough. 

 

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Access to joy is, I think, what permits good parenting. Or access to the brightness of the world, its tributaries of wonderment & imagination & fearlessness that aren’t yet occluded by the baffling entropies scaffolding the Reason that burgeons in us as we age. I feel this dampened heft rolled tight around whatever synapse connects my heart & mind to that access point. I am a dullard these days, & a sad one, & I want to tear seams in that sadness & see my children’s joys, profligate & many, but all is dimmed & distant. My own words in my mouth seem distorted & jumbled & not really even of my issue. I had started sleeping again & now Ada doesn’t sleep, so neither again do I. I am guilty harboring grief without resolve & then I am guilty springing into the kids’ happy play. My heart is leaden. There is ash in my blood. I am, I suppose, recomposing. 

I think of my two fathers: the one very much alive & laughing & then the one laid on on a hospital bed the morning he died, rolled into a white sheet & wheeled into a hearse. I was buffeted in my selfishness somehow, without thinking, by his living. In his absence, he is not there to block me from death, to guide me, to revel in my living. His absence means thousands of inscrutable things, their meanings revealing themselves in flashes & bursts or slow unfurling. They are a shadow streaking the pathway that we walk, & they are cruelest for their intimations of his presence while remaining so starkly his utter lack, a jabbing apophansis, a crushing aporia between the fluttering bird’s breast of a particular hope & the unsentimental sweep of song in all living & dying, the general kind, an unpeopled version. 

It is, after all, as ordinary as birth, & they remain to me these symphonies of the extraordinary. In birth the seeming proclamation of an individual miracle, a life unique to its circumstance, poised in possibility alone. & in death the erasure of the heart’s own song, the collapse of the heft of its accrued longing. All of that remembrance & fondness & love in a language charged with the inflections of the individual, carried aloft on a gale, fled from us. What is there in that brief flight to ponder of exteriority? Our meanings will end with us, but what they bridged us to, coupled sweetly against us, clamored after & sang through still out there, walking around, saying our name. We carry so many gifts. I clamor in, find him there, am careful in his carriage. He has said goodbye but we will not, until our own night falls. 

I don’t know. This shit is difficult, & enduring, & ripples through every layer we are made of, I am finding. Clutch close those you love, let them hear it & know its contours. & in saying that, as ever, I am saying it to myself, turning my gaze towards those beside me. Sighing & trying not to sigh.