V
A day where morning stretches. Songbirds in the distance. A cooling after a hot week. Much to do and as ever the little balancing act we manage where we manage never as much as we'd like.
I spent the end of April only writing in fragments and editing older pieces that I'm still unsure of. Unsure of their home, their place, unsure of my own home and place. I talk to someone about the concept of belonging to a somewhere, which he calls a combination of will and mystic luck, a certain feeling and knowingness I think most of us have experienced even where we've failed to follow it through with ourselves.
My mother goes to the cardiologist today, and I, being far away, can only wait for the news. One of the fragments I'd written was about her and this. Her long dying. And I am determined to rewrite most things over the alternative cobbling together of parts. But I am less inclined to tell you about it all now. I carry doom with me, and I have carried it for seven years. How I hope for the honor to throw it over my back for seven more.
But a friend is new to this, dragging it all behind him. And each of my nightmares now feature him and my concern. My dreams with their big budget and epic scenes. In one, he is being flayed and I am forced to watch. I cannot reach him. Men are holding me back by both arms. I wake myself screaming for it to stop.
In another, I am caught in a castle. My group hunted by another group. He infiltrates the walls, disguised as the side I must escape from. By the end, it doesn't matter. As by the end, a child is to be tossed into the sea that is swirling violent and indigo in a hungry roar of water and salted mist. I grab the child and run. I run over and across and through the giant rocks that have been thrown by the chalk cliffs which crumble more and more all around me; the world shedding its bones to bury what pursues us as I cradle the small body of an infant against my chest. And run. And run. And run.
I know what the dreams mean. I just don't care to mention it here. And I don't really care to talk about the friend at all any longer than I have. They come, they go. They hang a hat on my door as if to retrieve it. I do not think they will retrieve it.
And so of course, what else could ever be done or be at all? I understand, and the understanding brings with it the nothing it has always brought. That strange recipe of acceptance and grief, a fault of my own discovered or yet to become so. The blame with its head across my lap, still as a stone to examine.
Wrongness or rightness each as meaningless as one another in times like these when my friendship and kindness both are rendered useless and put to exile with the phrase of sustained absence, leaving only the ethic of choice in my control, to protect the autonomy of not only the self but the others I encounter. To include in this the decision of withdrawal, be it through silence or language or some combination thereof. The men that through the exercise of their own desires to unknow me or be unknown by me are freed from my bother, business or witness.
In the end, it is all I can ask for, the freedom for all to choose and to see in this how beautiful it is when acted upon no matter my loss. How if I can bring nothing to you, I can relieve you of myself. How perhaps that, in a way, can be a gift.
