Whispering
I wrote this on a walk.
Sometimes I cry where only the trees can hear me. It’s the kind of crying that you can do by riding a bike. It’s crying by making tea. Tears run invisibly as I make my bed. It’s not the kind of tear you would see. Is that too much information for this medium? Is it better fit for a journal? Perhaps. But the lines are blurred these days, and I lost my glasses in Florida when we went for the memorial service and I haven’t seen them since. I should look for them. But maybe they’re on the Other Continent and there is nothing there that I want to look for in this moment where the msasas are whispering absolutely nothing at me, they’re just moving because the wind commands them to but the sun is shining directly on me and I think there can be no greater peace in this world than there is here on this veranda at this house with this family in this moment and perhaps I should just stop and breathe. It’s all a bit much, you know. It’s all a great swell; it’s all a great barrelling toward nothingness and a great sweep of love in the midst. I wonder if it will ever get old, all these sweeping tides, I wonder if I will continue to hide from them.
There’s a man going up the road on a rickety tuktuk, and he’s carrying gas canisters and the entire vehicle is moving very precariously, not to mention the dangerous cargo within. It’s silly because there are enough potholes that the whole thing could implode in a minute if all the wrong things happened at just the right moment. And maybe that’s all it was. All the wrong things, at just the right moment.
Soon I’ll have to return to The Other Continent and I am the furthest from ready for such a return as I have ever been. I shake at the thought of Amazon Prime, matcha lattes, left hand drive. I am excited to do all that I have set up for myself in this new year. I am afraid of all that I have to leave behind to do what I must do. To complete this chapter. It’s not the kind of thing that comes easily. But it does come with its perks.
I actually like the three trembling things I mentioned. I like them quite a bit. Its not so much that I don’t want to go back, as it is that I don’t want to leave. If there was a perfect world in which I could do both, I would have melded it to fit this desire. But no such world exists. So I must carry on in spite of.
It’s the same feeling as when you miss your greatest love, but they are sitting right next to you. An odd and unfathomable pit of mercury that slowly bubbles to boiling. The frog dies and does not know it. The water was room temperature, once.
<3