005
1.
A mistake was made: my emotional life usurped my life in art. I was focused on touch. By this you know I mean the lack thereof. And the reversals of that lack, too porous to hold any real meaning. A grasp in the direction of each other, wrestled out of a stifled gasp. I am being unfair but true. Our footsteps sounded guttural as if they had guts. If I had disappeared then or anytime afterward it wouldn’t have mattered.
2.
Primarily I want to be intelligent. I do. So I read and I research and I reference and I write. I clarify that I know when my articulation has stalled, that I notice my intent being muddied. (Silence, too, is a form of admission.) But I also have to echo Mary Oliver: “Mostly I want to be kind.”
Or, more specifically, I want to extend my humanness in the most constructive of ways. The seats on the train nearest the mentally unwell person pacing and tearing up loose sheets of paper and doing pushups on the ground are vacant. I sit at one across from him, by the window— the domain of the repudiated.
I am thinking about what emptiness means, who it serves. Into the tense air a small, billowing gratitude: that this time it isn’t us pacing in public, that we have the ability to make the choice of quiet, upright sitting, minding business, riding westbound like the sun.
August 4 2023