into the strenuous briefness
Life:
hand organs and April
darkness, friends
i charge laughing.
Into the hair-thin tints
of yellow dawn,
into the women-colored twilight
i smilingly glide. I
into the big vermilion departure
swim, sayingly;
(Do you think?) the
i do, world
is probably made
of roses & hello:
(of solongs and, ashes)
I said it hurt but I don't think at first she believed me, not really, not the extent to which I was telling the truth. I cried and she said she was sorry but I wasn't crying because she hurt me, just because there were tears in my eyes and they spilled out. I said it hurt and she looked and looked at me, thought about it, examined the data, the broken parts that couldn't heal, the smoke rising from where I'd been scorched. I said it hurt and she said she didn't mean for it to hurt but that didn't make it better. We talked about what to do now, because I had wanted everything to be the way it was but it couldn't be because everything was broken and then I realized that I didn't even want it to be the way it was so much as I just wanted it to not hurt. She said it would take time and I believed her and I went and stood on a beach and watched a storm roll in and at night everything washed over with salt water and every morning I took the pills and waited for the time that it would take for enough time to pass. Because it does pass, time, it's moving in one direction, and if you promise me it's going to stop hurting I believe you though of course I'm always left with the memory of the pain and the fear of repeating it. Today it was supposed to stop hurting, I know it was today because I marked it on the calendar. And she held my face in her hands and looked and looked at me. She said, I didn't realize how far down it went, this pain of yours. She said, I have given you more than anybody could need and you still have this hole, this ache that I could not fill, I am sorry. She said, now I understand why you said it hurt. And I said it did not hurt any more, because it didn't; I have a stone over the hole now and nothing is going to get past that so the hole is just my tiny secret and it doesn't hurt, I swear, not any more.
That one secret. You know the one. The one you can't tell because everything will fall apart. It sits on your chest at night, a squatting horrible homunculus. Presses the air from your lungs. Crouches in the back of your throat and tastes like tears. You learn to lie around it, to speak lightly, to make sunshine against this darkness that is the only thing that matters because it's the only thing that scares you. Not the thing itself, not the secret; you already know what it is. You're not afraid of what you know, you're afraid that someone else will know it. It's not even that; it's worse than that. You're afraid that knowing it will change them, the way that knowing has changed you. The only good thing about this secret is that it is yours, and it has cut you from the inside like glass; why would you give this to someone else, the pain of knowing this.
And yet you want so badly to be known. You want so much for someone to want to know you. You want to be loved despite, maybe even because of this secret. And they can't know you if they don't know this, can they? You know that not telling is a form of lying. Or is not telling a means of being known and loved for who you are besides this, the lightness of you without the darkness. Or are you the darkness, and the lightness is the lie. You don't even know any more.
One day you open your mouth. You tell her, finally, the truth. You roll the stone from your throat, tell her the secret. And realize in the telling that there is so much more, the small shards that are part of the larger break. Her eyes on yours: But you've been lying to me, you've lied all this time. How can I trust anything you say now? The homunculus leans forward, touches a greasy hand to your lips, smiles at you. You knew better than to tell. Or should have known.
We were going to go to a Lindy Hop class but we couldn't find the address so then we were going to go to a salsa class but when we went outside it was too beautiful to go back inside so we decided on drinking in a garden instead. The streets full of people as if the whole town had walked out at the same time. Two weeks ago it snowed and now all the restaurants have outdoor seating, though at U Karla they'd spilled out onto the sidewalk even, and we all sat and gazed up and around as the sky turned purple and the stars came out. An Australian, a Brit, an American, and a Czech walked into a bar and they all spoke the same language and the electrician told us the names of the stars except they were airplanes. In the morning I shaved off most of my hair because I wanted the sun on as much skin as possible and I had coffee in the garden and watched a toddler grow a egg out of his skull ("It happens" he said) and then lunch in another place and then more coffee, grinning like an idiot from one place to the next, and then board games which is how I know life continues at a weekly pace. On Friday the clouds were back and my head was so cold it was like an ice cream headache so I chained myself to the desk and hit a deadline and went to Olomouc where all the restaurant tables were reserved in case the atheist patriarch showed up, or I guess more likely his fans, and on the train home I listened to the same two songs over and over because I couldn't imagine another one being better, the small and certain pleasure of already having what you want. I took a taxi from the station because sometimes but only sometimes we must permit ourselves small luxuries and I was cold. I feel grateful and generous and generally good; if I had any idea what you wanted I would probably give it to you, but you don't tell me and I'm tired of guessing so this is me, getting on with it. I have a Monday deadline but I can't focus for beans today so I wrote this instead.
Oh you and your well-tended garden. The flowers that bloom and fade and bloom again, perennials and annuals though you can never remember which is which, the giant tulip bulbs you unearth in the winter and push back under the willing dirt in the spring, don't you know that it's rude to keep your tulips waiting when they're in the mood. Ahem. The bushes laden with sweet berries that you kneel beside, plunging your hands in over and over until your arms are stained with blood from the thorns and berry juice from your over-eager fingers. The sweet soft grass you can lie back on, nap in a sunbeam. Mysteries of ivy and your trellised longing, roses with unusual names and the richest scent, you cut them down in bunches and fill the house with their inverted death. And in the winter, even in the darkest month, the hum underground while the snow covers every surface into anonymity. Gardens are like this, they burst forth and fade in sequence and you love this flow, the pull.
In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;
“But I like it
“Because it is bitter,
“And because it is my heart.”
people I talked to:
Without wishing to oversimplify, it does seem pretty simple to me– to be the person you want to be, start being that person. If you want to be different, change. If you can't change, then stop sitting around wishing you could. I don't mean unrealistic things, because it is true that I have not stopped wishing I could have wings and or a tail, but the things that are well within your range — if it bothers you that you aren't a certain way, why aren't you working towards being that way? Or working towards not being bothered?
I want to be a person who clears deadlines, and so… I clear deadlines. I thought that I would like to be a person who can strike up a conversation with a stranger and enjoy it, but after having given it a valiant effort for a few years I concede that I am not that kind of person and it doesn't bother me anymore because anyway they invented podcasts so I do that instead and it's lovely. I sometimes think that I would like to earn more money at my job but then I remember that I had a job that paid me ridiculous piles of money and I loved that job, but when I stopped loving it I had to quit so I know that money is not as important as I thought it was.
I decided a couple years ago that I want to be the kind of person who says YES unless there's a really good reason to say NO. Curiosity killed the cat, but only after she got a good look. Last week, I was asked to go on a trip and I'm going because there was no reason to say no. I cracked my tooth and it got infected and I won't have time to fix it properly before I go so I expect this little adventure will be like an intensive spa — all sunshine and no solid food. See you in 10 days, assuming I can't figure out how to post pictures while I'm gone.
“One of the cruelest things you can do to another person is pretend you care about them more than you really do.” ― Douglas Coupland
This quote has popped up on my feed a few times in the past week and it baffles me. I can only assume Mr. Coupland, or more accurately the character that Mr. Coupland has express this sentiment, has had an awfully easy life. I think there are lots of things more cruel that you can do. Leaving aside actual physical cruelty I can still think of things that are much worse than pretending to care. You could care and pretend you don't, for example, and isn't that also fairly awful? You can genuinely not care about someone who wants you to care about them even a little, and you could let them know you don't care. You can care and then abruptly stop caring, and not explain. You can explain. You can set the phone down gently on the counter and walk away for a little while instead of just hanging up, you can practice hanging up, you can practice lots of things that are more cruel than pretending you care.
To be clear, I think genuine caring is a lot nicer, but sometimes you want to care but you have a deadline or you know you should care but there's a stone in front of your heart and it's hard to feel much of anything. Sometimes you are swirling in a vat of molasses and tears and the only way to keep yourself afloat is by pretending not only to yourself but to other people that you give a shit about anything at all, and the people who let you pretend to care about them are full life rafts, and sometimes in the middle of pretending to care you realize you can see the shoreline and you have a moment of real caring that you couldn't have gotten to otherwise and I don't think that's cruel to anybody.
And anyway, there are very few places where the emotion behind an act is really all that important. What does caring look like? Cook a meal, change diapers, make tea, show up, listen. Caring is easy; it involves only slightly more effort than watching a television program or reading a book and wondering what happens next. I spent enough of my younger life agonizing because I feared that people didn't really care about me and trying to keep being cared about by the few people who I thought genuinely might, and I'll tell you what I know: caring about other people is a kerjillion times easier than worrying if they care about you. And it feels better; it just does.
I hereby solemnly swear that I shall not ever care about anyone who posts this quote on facebook, just to be on the safe side, though. Because I care too much to be cruel.
Today, the sky's the soft blue of a work shirt washed
a thousand times. The journey of a thousand miles
begins with a single step. On the interstate listening
to NPR, I heard a Hubble scientist
say, "The universe is not only stranger than we
think, it's stranger than we can think." I think
I've driven into spring, as the woods revive
with a loud shout, redbud trees, their gaudy
scarves flung over bark's bare limbs. Barely doing
sixty, I pass a tractor trailer called Glory Bound,
and aren't we just? Just yesterday,
I read Li Po: "There is no end of things
in the heart," but it seems like things
are always ending—vacation or childhood,
relationships, stores going out of business,
like the one that sold jeans that really fit—
And where do we fit in? How can we get up
in the morning, knowing what we do? But we do,
put one foot after the other, open the window,
make coffee, watch the steam curl up
and disappear. At night, the scent of phlox curls
in the open window, while the sky turns red violet,
lavender, thistle, a box of spilled crayons.
The moon spills its milk on the black tabletop
for the thousandth time.
tuckova 