A woman I know tells me she is underwater. Me, too, I think. Later, driving down the hill, I picture myself in aquamarine water, light dancing like the gemstone. I am fully clothed, upright, swathed in rising bubbles. My head is just below the surface, and right now, I think, I’m not even coming up for air.
I’m just trying to grow gills.
I am still resisting what is much of the time, refusing or unable to accept the reality I’ve somehow landed in. Reason doesn’t seem to help—my mind fails to convince me even though I am 100% certain accepting things as they are is the only way to move forward with anything even close to grace. But it is a thing of the body, this resistance, and all the logic in the world does no good.
[Words were reality and reason.]
Months into the pandemic, I began noticing a weird rash on my right wrist. I thought it might be from washing my hands and wrists too often because of the virus. (Yes, it’s true. I developed the habit of adding my wrists to the equation. Wrists rest on all kinds of surfaces.) The rash went away twice but came back. Then I noticed it was vaguely heart-shaped, lopsided, like a good beach rock. It has stayed with me ever since. Now I joke to myself it is my stigmata. Not in the usual sense—marks mirroring the wounds of Jesus that appear by divine grace on others, marks of honor—but evidence of inner wounds made outer. One day I wonder if the crooked heart on my wrist might be a message, like images of Mother Mary appearing to people in their homemade pancakes. Maybe my lopsided heart is reminding me to be compassionate with myself. Maybe it’s telling me I’m loved.
I have a hundred things sitting on my shoulders, turning them to bricks, dangling off my head like snakes or like the orange cat sitting on the teenage boy’s head in the funnies the other day. Harmony escapes me most of the time, except moments like this, with all of us writing together, and the house finch singing outside the open window.
I dream of waking in a big bed in a big, dark, empty room. I feel weight against me, but I am not afraid. I reach forward and a multi-colored cat shies away from me, feral, I think, and leery, but she doesn’t leave. I turn to see several slender, leggy, black cats have piled against my whole back. They move and rearrange themselves, six or seven or eleven of them. This is the whole dream, and I wake curious and grateful and somehow reassured by the universe.
I am grinning, my spirits lifted a bit by the lightness of humor, by just being together, and maybe because we are such funny creatures, we humans. We have a history, of course, and a present, both far from funny. You do not need to hunt for atrocity in our world. It lives large on every page, large print as we grow older, maybe even the books we love to hunker down with, embrace the horror with the unlikely heroines, or dream of the day when the U.S. Congress is finally, forever and ever, no longer so hideously white and male, but dark skinned and female and queer all rising to the fore.
[Spontaneous writing session with the words humor, hunker, hunt and history.]
It comes on me in quiet moments, between one moment and the next, looking out the window in between tasks or standing and waiting for my tea kettle to boil, that deep longing for my little trailer home. I remember what it was like there when I could just let things fall away, in my courtyard under our big desert sky, or sitting in my living room listening to the house finch chatter on the open louvers on a hot summer afternoon. Sleep is different there, too, deeper, simpler, and waking seemed quieter, gentle and easy, lingering longer in the space between sleeping and waking, the delicious heaviness of the covers in winter, the cold air on my face, turning over, maybe, to court more dreams, or to lie awake in a kind of quiet joy, letting my mind roam.
No Holds Barred 