I felt trapped in an endless single moment of time.
Nothing was real except the deafening silence of the dynamic between my mother and father and the lie of a white picket fence we had been gritting and grinning our teeth to trick the world into building for us.
Every thing slipped slowly backward, as in a dream of falling down hill, not quite real enough to feel the fall, but not grounded enough to move away.
If it were not for daily walks in the nearby almond orchard, I would Not have known that the grass still grew in the spring. I forgot that the spiders still built webs that were taken down each new rain. I forgot that the bees were kept, and that people were fighting addiction in order to make it home to see their nephews.
I found freedom in the silence at some point. A sandbox world for me to wander in, no real consequences to my actions. It was a loneliness like the womb. Eventually I tried to escape. Many escape attempts. How many miles put between me and that room? How many cars busted down on the side of the road, running away from home. I discovered new worlds I never knew could exist. I watched the leaves turn in different biomes. I made love to other lonely people, unhappy and afraid of the world and their place in it,
not when we were together though.
together we were infinite, real, in awe of the fact that we could be so
unmasked.
naked and unafraid.
I watched the masks of my parents relationship deteriorate with
the advent of disease and age.
I watched the pain and patterns of abandoning I had felt my whole life play out in their pantomime before me, day after wretched day.
I stared at a wall.
I slept with my guitar.
I slept with more lonely people with perfect hearts.
I invested in the means to transmute all these...feelings...into art, audiovisual storytelling, and physical creativity.
And once I had built a temple to my pain,
I boarded the doors and windows. I never went inside.
I just sat on the stoop, obsessively trying to work out all of the world's problems- my problems as an inextricable part of the world- by thinking.
If I could just strategize a way to never get hurt,
Then I wouldn't need to deal with the inconvenience of pain.
If I could concoct a cocktail of constant cope,
I could cruise forever without feeling the ocean
of space
between us
all.
If it were not for the orchard, I would have forgotten that frost formed on the ground. Even with the endlessly straight rows of trees, the square grid of houses, and the box-like hospital next door...a tiny twig out of place or a clover, remembered me that there is wild growth, that I am wild growth, unfettered and untethered by the paltry attempts at geoscaping.
Inland, I remember how vast the ocean is.
how vast
the space
between
us
all
and
still
still
still
Inland, I yearn for the ocean.
Remembering that I have always felt most free in the water.
a healing reflection on four years of suffering and that started with a heart failure, a heart break, and a pandemic.