Skip to main content

Surface tension

 

My vocabulary was the first to go.  Simple words would escape me and I would end up searching around for them like I do for my glasses in the dark. I would come back with inadequate replacements.  I blamed zoom, I blamed stress.  What I never really considered was that maybe I was searching for words when there were none.  

Next came the conversation.  It dried up.  I used to love winding endless discussions like a river with many tributaries, some mountain fed, some coming from deep within the forest.  On really exciting days, the rain fell and made the river overflow. However, the river bed's water evaporated. I think about conversations now fondly like I do of childhood pastimes.  I cannot seem to reach for anything more substantial than what I am eating. or seeing on the internet or of course the weather.  I am boring myself.

These past several months have felt a bit like musical chairs. The music stopped and I was without a chair.  

I knew there was something really different when my imagination became a closed circuit.  Instead of being repopulated with new and interesting dimensions, the rooms of my mind emptied out and decluttered.

I sit right there on the surface.  It is not a stable place to sit. I have no chair. The thin surface won't hold me long, but if I break through, how fall will I fall? Will I know how to swim or will I float right back up to the surface without words or ideas? Or words or ideas I don't know yet?

 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Small Craft

I accompanied my mother-in-law to an appointment this week. On the paper, preparing her for the appointment, it invited her bring along something to read or a small craft. As soon as I heard about this invitation to bring a small craft into an otherwise austere waiting area, my mind started to do bouncing somersaults in many different directions. Googly eyes? Glue gun? Feathers? Play clay? Friendship braclets?

The words coming out of my mouth

  These days I wear a mask. I don't wear a mask all of the time, only when I am indoors or unavoidably up close with people who I don't usually interact with.  I wear one when I am ordering things, or buying things or attempting to enjoy some form of public entertainment.  I cannot rely on reading others lips. My lips are hidden. We ask each other to repeat.  We move our eyes or our whole heads to try and enunciate more clearly.  I say fewer words, more carefully chosen words behind the mask. Sometimes that is helpful, sometimes that just causes more confusion. I walked into the woods. I did not need a mask.  I only saw a few other people and they were distanced. Masks were unnecessary. After so much talking and not talking and avoiding talking out loud I am forced to examine when I speak and when I choose not to. This is not a bad thing since I can be an insufferable chatter box, just a new thing for my brain to adjust itself to. When I am not standing aro...

Bringing her back

 As the first anniversary finally passed, I exhaled.  The sadness still nibbled away at the edges, but not clawing deep into my chest like it had been with varying degrees of ferocity in the twelve months previously.  She died in early summer, so I plunged into ocean and lakes and ate fruit straight from the plant.  The grief became softer, the folk songs carried me along in the potato patch we planted in therapy. But then, I started to miss her.  The deep grief kept her so close and now as the pressure eased, so did her presence.  I held my breath and decided to be really sad this morning just to see her face.  To sit in her prescence.  My breath became jagged as I cried for her, for us.   This Taylor Swift cover  by Marc Maron broke me right open this morning.  Here's to staying broken open enough to keep your loved ones close. And then, I walked into her garden. The garden she envisionied, planted over and over and still pre...