Digging Towards Home
August
Picking myself back up a er wilting in the heat. Every day the sun rises, crests, and I melt again. I am constantly re-freezing myself, to play games with nighttime, to transform, crystalize. When it’s hottest, I run to the lake and back, tracing my thoughts in the cracks in the concrete spreading out beneath my feet. I think I am waiting for something to happen. I think it is already happening. Everything is coming into focus, more solidly, the way the house creaks and the way the cat that lives on our street knows when I am coming home. The places I sit, the places I cry. they are becoming more real, and they move towards me, meeting me as I sink down into them. Every day I am more open, and more heavy. I am sinking down into this earth. I will pull you with me.
September
We hold each other’s company delicately, with pain and uncertainty and finally love. I hold other things too: the questions between routine and freedom, the differences between accepting this history and writing our own. I consider them carefully, feel their weight and size. I watch their sand fall through my fingers and dust the pavement like coarse sugar on morning buns. When it is dark we fill our lungs with smoke. We want oblivion. That is when the world hits hardest though, when we are swinging so far to the other side. It picks me up and puts me back down. Everything is unexpected, wild, provocative, strange.
I have been thinking about all the people I love and where to put love and who to touch and how to grow more love by the windowsill with water and light. Splitter splatter of light. Dappled thumbprints upon my heart. Tears on the dashboard. Hot and cool. Dry bristles. Dark oil. I paint lines, wet into wet: colors mix, confusing themselves and becoming more beautiful. Wet creases divide my legs from my body. Summer is over but it is still hot. It is still hot and more solidly still, we congeal.
October
The colder it is, the more I love you. The more I love this patch of earth. This orbit that we are making again and again, centripetally, moving ever closer towards the center. It is raining at the lake now. I don’t run there anymore. Better to stay close to home. I’m learning how to live here, really be here and feel the dirt on my hands, the smudges on my face as I wipe the snot pooling in my nose. I embrace ease. I hug my knees to my chest. I generate my own heat. We are juicy balls of fire, rolling towards one another, clearing the brush as we go. Forest fires, we illuminate the early night. And my lungs aren’t full of smoke now. I inhale the coldest air of fall thus far and sigh it out, my chest is still, my head clear. I am here.
