Just Keep Swimming

There are so many thoughts now that I can’t write here. Not now. Maybe it’s time to start another handwritten practice. I’m not sure what is happening to be honest. I have lost ambition.

I’m not happy about it. But on the other hand, it feels like sleep.

I know I can’t be bothered to stress about typos, or to shape these little posts into proper essays to post elsewhere, to reach a “demographic”. Right now it isn’t about the product at all. It’s the processing.

I’m learning to listen. And to trust that that – in my silence – things are settling into a deeper understanding: more wholly, and more secure with roots taking hold through the time it takes to connect to memory – to experience. I am taking time. Probably because I have to. None of this is by choice. I would much rather slide over everything as though it’s all part of a pop-quiz “close reading” to pin down the meaning of each interaction. But every non-sequitur in a conversation doesn’t need to be a Freudian puzzle or a Cassandrian prophecy. I don’t have to participate in the construction of a distance between moment and mind.

I no longer believe that if I can put words to it, I can handle it better. I can pack it into a carpet bag and carry it with me. Heavily pulling on one shoulder, then the other. I can give someone I love a “truth” wrapped in cellophane and ribbons, but it will always be symbolic: a kind of allusion that takes us both away from ourselves.

I mean, it’s not like we swim in the river then take it home with us, dragging it along like an enormous plastic bag with a single goldfish we want to keep in a bowl in the entrance hall – with blue marbles.

Glass pebbles sorted from the long stretch of beach. I was well into my 30s when we vacationed in Rhodes and I learned that broken glass is rendered harmless by the movement of the tides. Days in, days out.

Nothing truly goes away. But if everything is continually changing, and we are meeting a new world with every blink of our eyes, it’s all past tense and there is no rush to write the story, no singular truth to decipher.

Right now it is about daring to go into the water. About letting the fish go ahead and bite.