Longing to me is about being in a body, like Zora Neale Hurston and our little mudballs, wanting to “show our shine.” I think the earth herself holds a kind of longing in her, a kind of yearning or ache, a sadness, maybe. To me it’s all wrapped up together, these clumps of earth us, what it means to be a being in a body, longing to belong, the impermanence of things in this life we live.
[Editor’s note: written from a prompt from Creative Writing Prompts.]
He was getting cold, but he wasn’t ready to leave. The winter sun abandoned his usual spot in the mid-afternoon, and he’d left his blanket outside the walls, folded with care and tucked up in the fork of his favorite tree. He wasn’t yet used to the sun being so far south in the sky, and these narrow streets blocked so much of the light in all seasons. He sighed and got to all fours, managed to stand up without groaning out loud. No one wanted to hear him groan, he knew. No one wanted to think he might be truly suffering, and he didn’t want people to think he was faking it to play on their sympathy, a ploy for more coins in his copper cup. The truth was he was getting old and creaky. Getting up off the cobblestones wasn’t as easy as it used to be, and the dampness in the stones, the cold that never left them for long this time of year, made it harder. But he didn’t want people to feel sorry for him. He liked his life for the most part. He wouldn’t have chosen to go blind like this, slow and steady, but if something had to give, he thanked the Weaver every day that she hadn’t taken his hearing. Then he would have had to struggle not to feel sorry for himself. He might have become the pitiful sight some people already thought he was. But the Weaver had left him his hearing and his voice, so every day he got to lift himself up to the sky, carry himself across the tops of the eastern forest, sail across the southern sea. Weaver be praised.
[Editor’s note: written from a prompt from Creative Writing Prompts. Plus, I have borrowed the Weaver from my favorite writer, Guy Gavriel Kay, and his wonderful Fionavar Tapestry.]
He couldn’t believe the school was making him have a different kind of class card than everyone else just because he was a foreign student. Foreigner, they should have said. Dark-skinned Middle Easterner. Alien. Maybe he should just wear a sign around his neck: fucking scary. His grandfather would just shrug it off with that peculiar arrogance. But he didn’t feel like that. He wanted to be liked, to feel welcomed in this high school. In his biology class, they each had to take a blood sample from themselves, quick pinprick, smear across the slide. His lab partner Callie gaped when she looked through the microscope at his blood. He swore her jaw dropped. She looked up at him then, confused. He saw it on her face. She’d expected his blood to look different under the glass.
[Editor’s note: written from a prompt from Creative Writing Prompts.]
I dream of wearing a sign. Something like, “I’m so sorry. We want you here.” Sueno de tener un letrero que dice, “Lo siento mucho. Les queremos Uds. aquí.” Quiero decir, “No se vayan.” I want to say don’t go. Quiero decir que millónes mas gente no le votó como ellos que votaron para él, nuestro “residente.” I want to say three million more people voted against him than voted for him, our “resident” en la casa blanca. Quiero decir esto es su país, también. This is your country, too. Please don’t go. I speak to my favorite flower vendor, watch him take it all on his broad shoulders, this weighted world. I see him shrug, something I’ve admired for years, the way so often someone who grows up in Mexico can make so much room inside themselves for acceptance. “Vivimos la vida que viene,” he says. We live the life that comes.
The morning after the last of my fever, I feel like something sat on me all night pushing my bones into the earth of our campsite. I head toward the meadow to do my qi gong, but I stop inside the pines. I don’t want the sun, don’t know why. I study the pine needle ground and choose my spot. I face west. Maybe because I am already slow, creaky and sore, I move through all the movements without a hint of rushing, without becoming lost in the habit of it. Halfway through I hear a tinkling passing back and forth among the trees nearest me, like hummingbirds but not, like bells, like the shimmer of light on water if it were a sound. I think of Tinkerbell, sprinklings of fairy dust. I don’t even feel goofy for it; it feels like my soundest reference, in fact. Unseen bird or invisible beings in this grove? Whoever they are, it feels like a visitation. They don’t stay long. After, I press my palms together before my chest, quiet awe and gratitude seeping out of my skin, chasing away the last taste of fever. Thank you, all.
I do my qi gong in Clive’s back yard. I face east, the direction of the liver in traditional Chinese medicine. I stand before the climbing vines and blackberries, the wonderful vegetable garden, old growth, parts untamed, calls to me. I lean forward from my waist, head hanging, arms loose to the ground. I like the looks of me, this upside down view, my feet’s tan lines darker than ever from all my walking this week, the blues and thin-lined purples of my plaid pants, my stones dangling from my throat, the aqua aura bluer today against the blue of my thin shirt, the red yarn still tied to my left wrist, and that little rush of recognition, of familiarity, of fondness for myself. This is me.
I daydream about the two of us playing this greeting game. I begin because of the new big cup I bought for drinking my morning tea. I don’t start thinking about you, but you are evoked. Cocked head moment while these thoughts move through me and the mountains go orange with that first light of the sun. House finch, bougainvillea, the sliding glass door wide open. “Good morning, gorgeous,” I say. I read it from the side of my new cup. The birds are loud. I say it again and again, experimenting with the delivery. I say it like a dreamy 1930s MGM male lead and giggle. I am having fun more often, make myself laugh out loud. Somewhere in this reverie you arise, softened as I am toward you because of my book. I imagine the sleepy-voiced man who is still calling be gorgeous after decades together, like it’s all lovely and automatic. Darn the writing. Darn you.
No Holds Barred 