I think about you every time I’m washing dishes.

I don’t know what about washing dishes, in almost any sink, but especially when the sun shines through the window, brings me so readily back to your high rise a decade past…

When we were just friends, not even lovers, not even enemies yet.
Not detractors, deceivers, or responsible for each others pain yet…
as far as we knew.


I used to see you in everything, every little mundane aspect of the physical world and life in it seemed to have a corollary to our time together.
Now it’s just the dishes. Every. Single. Dish.
Locked up in washing…a sense of care I wish to give to the world, to those I love.
The smallest gesture I am sometimes allowed to do for folks who are wrapped so hardly in their own cocoons of self-reliance, that even sometimes relinquishing a plate or bowl reminds them that they feel burdensome.
It’s my little action to hairline the shield wall. The tiniest ice pick, excavating a child within Pleistocene ice.

I used to think I could reach you with a song…
If only I had the courage to write one.
I wished I could boldly explore the depths of love in such grand gesture as lyricism, metaphor, or (god willing) harmony.
But rhythm to the risk averse is one-note.
And I can toss that in the chest of regrets, with all the other too-lates, not-enoughs, misunderstoods that I’ve collected.
But if I pull something out of there, and make it, In the wrong era, In a different key than I thought it should have been in, In spite of myself and in spite of you…
Will you listen to what I discover?
Well,
Doesn’t matter though,
I’m doing it anyway.
Here’s to…

“The lady at the unemployment office made me cry”



You said to me from a million miles away.


It cracked my spirit box open further so the light now shines around my tiny no-longer-dark room.


I open my eyes when I wake up and take in the shapes of things from my whole life.
I don’t know whether to feel comforted, terrified, old, young, abundant, alone, or a secret seventh thing.

I choose to feel all of them. And that felt like…me. And it felt like…relief,
like you felt when the lady in the unemployment office saw you as a person.
When someone inside of a system built to be difficult and dehumanizing humanized you and made it easier.
Relief, like so many never get to feel, no matter how bad I want them to.

My fingers gliss on tiny celluloid keys and moan with me in the agony of breaking branches as my tree ribs split and release a thunder through the ground and back up all the chimneys in my neighborhood. I am trying to hold a single note steady, but I was not made to mourn for the lost love of mothers and unmet brothers millions of miles away.
I cannot mourn for you this year, it is too big, I must already say goodbye to every child I have ever been, where is the space within this small box of a room?
My spirit box releases many me’s into the air, whirling wildly in a frenzy into the forest, the din cracks branches you use to climb when you were little, and now, and now, and now,
I feel relief.
You want to see struggling people get a moment of this.
The space to breathe.
The space for me.
I want to smile more.
I want to learn to cook.
I want to dance with people.
I want to share this everything I have yet to be.
I want to speak to strangers. I want to see the fear in their eyes as they see the fear in mine.
I want to see people who are struggling to get help find themselves again beyond the terrors.
I want to help.


You see me, you said, from five thousand miles away. You seem brighter, like a full moon.
It’s easy like that, to see, when you shine.
I know I can only collect so many boxes of souls…and that all containers are temporary,
like my room.
I scream, and inside the sound is more love than I’ve ever felt in my life.
I’m becoming the ocean again.
In this life is everything you could dream of.
Swim with me.