and just like that. the sun is out. there are strap marks lining my skin. tomatoes have grown yet not quite matured. things have changed. and they haven't. i count time on the tops of my feet.
i had a moment a couple of weeks ago where i felt my ribcage melting into one giant unmovable mass, constricted and claustrophobic. there are people going through worse. there are people buying mansions. there are starving children and diamond rings. there are manicures and emergency surgeries and i remember afternoons. i have a picture hidden behind the tips of my eyelashes where my father sits in a hospital bed and he doesn't know where he is or why. but my six year old daughter reads him shel silverstein and he smiles. lifts his head and laughs. am i telling you about him? or am i telling you about me?
i do not know how to hold onto the reality of any given situation. i only know how to disappoint myself with my inability to make a beautiful bow at the end of every day. i know how to drink one too many glasses of wine. i know how to dig my head in the concrete when it comes to the big things and how to lose my shit over the details.
sometimes the only thing i know how to do is to step into the quicksand of letters strung together and pile them, one after the other, on a screen. or on paper. or on my skin. and then to let them go.
