Last year, I moved into the past.
"Without rest, there is no future."
I took a tin cup with me; three already-dry teabags. Every morning, fear. Every night, fear. I want to ask Mary how she feels on the ferry: how it is to be rocked by what none of us wants to fall into. “Without rest,” Mary says, “there is no future.”
When I disembarked, all my fears came with me. My fears won’t travel over salt water alone. My fears clap their hands and irritate me, so I set them down on an old stone and bind them with an older name. This morning I ate my breakfast as Mary sat, gazing out the window at the fir trees. I want to ask if it is easier or harder to be still, now that her legs don’t serve her. I want to ask what to do if I have grown the wrong kind of silence.
“The only way to see Agnes’ unconditional self,” Victoria Chang wrote, “is to open the window and hear silence, the thick shafts of blue.” I want to climb up into the thick shafts of blue, away from the scratch, the necessary too-many never-ending sacrifices that love lets in the door. Victoria Chang was responding to Agnes’ art piece Innocent Love. Where is innocent love? Is it folded on the bedside chair? Is it asleep in the pinecones?
I sleep for a night and a half and wake up to find The Photographer by Lorna Crozier copied into my journal. It is my handwriting but the letters are three times as large as usual and loose:
“There are days when you blind yourself with too much longing. Light is tactile then. With its many hands it washes the dullness from your skin, touches all that can’t be seen and makes it glow.” •
How many of this year’s pieces have begun from a line written by Victoria Chang? Many. In a workshop I attended, Dorianne Lux said: “You might get more and more lost. That’s good! You want to be lost.” This essay follows that logic.
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The terror of this year was being left behind.
One friend forked like lightning and shot away, all sparks. Another woke up so hungry, she ate an entire forest, one tree at a time. A town fed me childhood memories mingled over a smoking woodfire and then dozed off when I asked for a blessing. All that remained was the path forward.
Everything That Goes “Bang”
On some days I think trees can grow forever. I think I can close my eyes and the wind will resemble an explanation. On other days, I want to draw a briefcase, stuff everything that goes bang inside it, put the drawing in a bottle, and toss it out to sea. No one tells you that the fastest thing on earth is the future. No one tells you that sadness is so …
"Without rest, there is no future" will forever live on my fridge <3