Trifecta
Everything right now feels like an exhale into a deep sob. One of those sobs that leaves you doubled over, holding yourself, gripping your ribs through your back, letting tension run through and out of you.
It’s something like releasing pain, but not quite. Something in the soft, touchy spot between grief, anguish and relief. Grief for all of the people and things that have been taken, destroyed, upended and left behind in the monstrous chaos of the last three years. Anguish for the knowledge that it could all be different, that there are real people with the power to make decisions on that scale, and did not. Anguish also for the fact that despite all of those people with all of that power, there is still a gray space between what could have happened, what did, and what was always going to –– the bare truth that we, perhaps, were always on this trajectory, as a country.
And lastly, relief. Relieving yourself of holding any of it, allowing yourself to slip below the lukewarm, muddled waters of the present. To look up at the rippling surface of all of the things that you can and cannot change and notice that when you let go, you begin to float. You hold your breath, catch a ray of sunlight. It warms your cheeks. Relief for the reminder of warmth, for the reminder to come up for air, for feeling breath in your lungs and current at your limbs. Letting yourself drift and taking in the surroundings, letting the shore come to you.
I regret sometimes that I can only reflect in my senses. My politics, my education, my bank account tell me that there is more to be angry about. But it feels like this is what really brings me back, all that really matters.