Uncertainties inflated when the pandemic hit and we had to clutch more tightly onto what we had, onto the present, onto what mattered and we had to clutch tightly onto the value of things that had been undervalued when we ask where is our food going to come from and suddenly the jobs 'beneath you' become the ones that support lives and my parents so proud of their work and their home and their lives deflate like balloons over dinner in April because we clutch these family dinners like lifelines amidst all the turbulence we feel grateful to have each other which I don't think I've ever reflected on feeling and my parents tell me it's hard to work like all of this still matters when it doesn't matter at all, pushing buttons and pushing buttons, treating such pointless things with such urgency and we go to visit my grandparents for what I think might be the last time and my stomach churns in a way I never let it because I'm too busy thinking and planning and checking off stupid boxes and I wonder what the last word I'll ever say to my grandparents might be it can't just be goodbye so I tell them to be brave because the doors of the nursing home close behind us and I see homes and homes on the horizon driving back, homes with whole lifetimes lived out in them; and churches and cemeteries where lifetimes were lived out and landed here and they probably never thought their lives would end and I realize what a puny and fragile thing this life is and how can we pretend our own is so important when it is so impermanent; how can anything about my life that I clutch onto be important when it is impermanent; I find peace for the next two weeks only in imagining decay. Decay of this house, wood rotting to the ground; all my belongings cracking apart and becoming ash; all of my memories further and further away like I'm looking at them out the wrong end of a telescope. I feel like I've died but not quite; like my self has died, and I can't pick up a phone for weeks so instead I pick up a pen and paper and draw the scenery and I feel so far outside of myself that I do not know her anymore and my feet become too big for the shoes of my old life when I decide I do not want to die but I do not want to live for my self another minute
YOU ARE READING
We Are Drowning, How Should We Kill Our Time?
PoetryThis collection of stream of consciousness prose was written during a very special time in my life. I left the city following a massive burnout, and lived in the country for months. I began a garden, cut most of my ties to the outside world, and wro...
