Else
What is it really about, this need to compare everything, to make things like other things, to metaphor our way into a kind of calm that may not be like a scaffold erected around the air, but truly that? I sat in a church in Masaya, Nicaragua, in late afternoon, chose the pew because of how the light was on the floor, filtered through the stained glass window at the top and let down red. I looked at that light, and thought, it’s a little like blood seeping into something soft, then left in the sun; or, it’s more like the water of a watermelon on white sheets. But, in the end, it most honestly looked like red light on the floor of a church in Masaya, Nicaragua, in late afternoon. Forgive me for pulling that light away from itself, for announcing that the moon tonight is as thin as a penny in water, for telling you that you are like a lit match when you laugh. I would live from flash to singular blinding flash if I could, if that didn’t mean some species of despair, some dissolution of faith, if that’s a metaphor I may borrow; a tragic un-jigsaw-puzzling of ourselves and the connectedness we invent and demand; completion, of course, being a secondary, more sorrowful concern. For each breath really is like every other breath, and if it isn’t, then I must believe that what is carried over, shared, or at least remembered, is where it’s going, why it happens, why I need it; is everything, everything else. Robin Myers, 2010