What am I if the words go?
AI; Alzheimer's.
I can't muster myself to elaborate.
For now, I'm here: Christmas Eve morning, the damping of the darkness. The bodies of my children are cargo: the furrows of their ribs, their breath freighting the rooms I've walked out of, through the doors, the hall, down the stairs, stealing through my home. I mean stealing home– the speeding sun, quiet trundling down its track.
I forget how restorative quiet is. Perhaps because I get so little of it that hurts to remember. Thanks to Covid, I've had almost none since late December.
But now, for the first time in aeons, the house has been drained of shrieking and clomping and clacking and whining and running and weeping and incessant organ music and unnecessarily loud telephone conversations and arguments over turning off the organ music and Baby Shark. And what rushes to fill the space is sunlight and dust and– not silence, but the relief of small, discreet, noises.
The HVAC system heaving to life; the ice maker's click; the cat extending one paw. Outside, a bird or two. The snow is beginning to slide off the eaves and I hear, for the first time in a long time, my breath.
It feels like floating. Like swimming in syrup. Like love.
We're in it, and I'm flashing back. It is too hard, all this togetherness. I want my yurt.
I reflect on what's left.
I can still goof off. I can still eat. I can still walk. The trifecta!
I underrated all of these things early on, but I particularly underrated goofing off. I treasured my smarts; I valued my writing skill and my ability to perceive what's beautiful. I did not ascribe much importance to the fact that, most of the time, I'm ready to laugh.
But honestly, if we can't liven up our trek through the great steppes of existence by cracking a few fart jokes, then what is the point? Surely, laundry is not the point. If I find out, in the afterlife, that I am to be judged on the quantity and quality of my laundering, I am in deep, deep trouble. I do not separate my darks from my lights (spoiler alert: no one has died). I have never cleaned, and do not aspire to clean, my dryer vent (dicier; consider this my suicide note).
We don't know, in the beginning, what to value about ourselves. We prize what we lack, or what others praise us for, or what we are acculturated to want. Especially when you're young, it's difficult to perceive within yourself the outlines of what will sustain you.
Legs. Teeth. Diaphragm.
I associatie summers with sweat. Not hard-working, out-of-breath, honest-labor sweat, but unearned sweat, windfall sweat, the kind of sweat that appears on a milk glass when you pull it out of the fridge.
You step outside. You stand perfectly still. And you sweat.
Maybe it's not even sweat, just a kind of genera summer effluvium, like dew on morning grass.
Or it's freedom, not sweat, a byproduct of the chemical reaction between your life's routines and warmer weather, the customary gone liquid, wetting the back of your neck and knees, running in rivulets down the small of your back.
I love these sticky days. The cicadas swarm and the crickets chirrup and every hour lasts longer than you think it can.
