Summer’s ending with a knock in my chest, a fearful glance to the blues quietness brings. I bide my time with the warmth, with the sounds of potential that is January, push pins in a mood board. Still, a picture frame falls off my wall and breaks without being touched, and its sound on the floor is like a thunderclap. In another world, on another shore, this wakes me up. Like God’s hands colliding in front of my eyes, I’m jolted alive from the in between. But here I’m on my knees picking up the broken glass – splintered over the tiles, almost invisible if not for the shimmer – having to refuse the urge to take everything as an omen. Bats’ wings above my head in the night, my glance upwards, the smell of smoke… I’ve never been too good at not believing. This is what it makes of you, the waiting. A person to whom everything must mean something.
And suddenly there are no words that suffice, like I can show you my bare hands but not how they are still heavy. And suddenly, there is no need. I know, none of us are as different as we’d like to believe, as special, as alone. I feel it when I do things that know no time. My hands made useful; in wet dough, kneading, stretching, folding, running through my dogs’ fur, laying on the one I love’s chest. Someone has done this and this and this, for so long before me, for so long after me, and it’s now my turn, just for a little while. How reckless of me to waste it, thinking anything more has been asked of me than just this. It has a sound, and a smell, this feeling, and I can’t write it to you, but I think you know.
Then the moment passes, and I’m mortal again in the worst way. Better to be just flesh and bone and vapour, better to be the bread, better to be the hand. But I’m 24 calling myself 25 because it’s a month away from being the truth, and somehow that already makes me 26, the age I long ago chose as the one to hook all my dreams on. And I can’t stop thinking how my mother was younger than me when she bore her first child, and my father had known war and death and loss, and how it’s not without resentment that I’ve been spared - the way they love me. Their dreams hook onto me too, and something else. Memories not of my own, fears come true, missed chances, tucked and folded over, mine now to keep safe, shape into something new.
I saw doing this much clearer once, somehow. Now, even the image of me in the mirror is all blurry. At times I yearn for a new face, an old one, someone else to carry it all for me. In between the eyebrows, in the downturn of the mouth, it’s true, I see, that these lines mean something. And it’s a stranger, and it’s a friend, and it’s a recurring nightmare where I must fend for myself alone.
What would it mean to let it shatter? The mirror, the memories, would out of them fly some impossible, endless summer? Would I swallow it, the hook in my throat, and sing from it a poem with words from which no more are needed? More than understanding, or success or achievement or burdens well carried, would I forget to search, and in the absence of searching (and not the presence of what’s found), would there finally be joy?
The heater is on in February, the sun low at 8. I yearn to not notice, I vow to stop waiting.
this is so incredible, you're such a beautiful writer ❤️
Truly universal, thank you nami !