Surely if I Threw Myself to the Wind

I’ve heard it’s all happening at the zoo. The perfect day: sun, breeze, the warm and raw scent of creatures; the shrill cries of spoiled children with their sticky ice-cream faces. Cell phone strangely silent in my pocket, and before I leave, I buy a stuffed tiger. Now I have something new to hold when I get home.

I like to go to the zoo, or to my back yard, or right now even to the first-floor bathroom because there’s a wasp living there, in the ceiling above the vent. I like to watch the creatures that are alive, things that have a will of their own. Animals, because they just do things; they want to do something and they do it. They operate purely from instinct; run stay eat sleep fight, defend attack hide play. I’ve never seen an animal overanalyze, or stumble all over themselves trying to keep the entire world from collapsing, the way I tend to do. Dominos are falling everywhere and I’m tired of feeling like it’s my job to set them back up again. It’s not; they’re not my dominos, it’s not my floor, and I know it’s nice to do things for other people and that I should just do the work in front of me whether it’s my job or not, but then everything becomes my job and I can’t fix it all. I can’t fix you, the enigma like a letter never sent. I can’t even fix me and that really needs to be done, though sometimes I’m not sure if anyone remembers that I’m still broken. I am no architect of souls, or of dominoes. I just want to clean up my own messes. I just want to fold my life up nice and neat, then tuck myself into it right where I belong. I just want to organize myself, then relax for a little while.

So I’m making a few changes that might make that possible. It’s a little surreal--I’m doing it. I’m making a change. Me. I hate change. I hate change but I need it now cause life won’t stop and I don’t want to go the way I have been. I’ll keep moving, as life and time demand—just in a different direction. And with each step I’ll be moving farther and farther away from the gray, vague notion of “the future” that hung in my mind like a cloud of thick smoke. Farther and farther away from the predictable. Closer and closer to I don’t know what; closer to some world I knew existed but never thought I’d be a part of. And maybe I still won’t; we’ll see. But I’m going to try.
I’m going to try to branch out; I’m going to try to do different things and go different places, but stay pretty much the same myself cause God made me that way and it’s probably time I stop trying to be anything else.

I think I’ve figured out my personal paradise. The revelation both surprises me and doesn’t. I think I’ve figured out that I am happiest when my life is in motion. When I am going new places and doing new things; new and strange experiences and adventure and anything can happen. My paradise is nowhere in particular; it is everywhere, potentially. And anywhere mistakes are ok, because it’s just part of the adventure. I like not knowing what’s going to happen next, not knowing where I’ll be in a few months. I want to choose a life like this; a life that can take me anywhere at any time to do anything. And I want to live it boldly, not quite so careful. That will take practice though; I tread so lightly now. I don’t care for this careful behavior, and what harm would it do, really, if I didn’t try quite so hard to avoid disturbance? I feel like I have some room to relax, maybe. My secrets are small, relatively. In the grand scheme of things they don’t really matter. Some would be embarrassing or shameful or sad to discuss, but then, I am human. I’m not the best one, but I’m not the worst either. I want to just let myself go, go, go, like a runaway kite. I might get stuck in a tree—my clanging, colored pattern of polygon shapes wrestling weakly with pointed branches and soft, green leaves—but I will know it was the wind that put me there—God’s own wind, because He blows it and surely if I threw myself to the wind and trusted it completely, the Lord send it this way and that until it and I accomplished His purposes.

Sometimes I give myself this pep talk, about the life I want to try for and the seeming attainability of freedom from both past and future mistakes; the sovereign God and His wind and what that has to do with me. And then my place on the sofa seems so small. I curl up, usually, fitting entirely on about three-quarters of a cushion while dogs fill up the rest. I don’t like to take up much space; I don’t like to exist too largely. I must I must I must be as small as dust here on my little cushion in my little house in my little town; it’s as if no one could ever find me here. My laptop balanced on my feet, keeping them warm, or a book wedged somewhere in the tangle of my legs to hold it open while I read, or my sketchbook across my lap, or my journal on the armrest. With so many of my favorite things right there at my fingertips, the hermit in me compels me to stay. It’s so warm and comfy, and I don’t mind that it smells a little like cats.

But at a certain point, it isn’t enough. I’ve become a hermit; I’m not one naturally. So I think about my paradise—my real one, not the corner of the sofa that seems so safe—and I begin to look forward to getting out in the world. I am always so very nervous, about getting out and then feeling tired and sick while I’m away from what is familiar, but when I think enough about what I truly want out of life, it seems worth the pain and fatigue of fighting lupus. I hope—I pray—that it does end up being worth it; that I will be glad I worked so hard for things that come so easily to those blessed with good health. I hope too that I will achieve things that come easily to no one, and then maybe I’ll know that in spite of everything I did it, and then it’ll feel like it’s worth that much more. I hope.

I live a small life in a small town, and I am smaller still. Small like the girl who doesn’t know anyone’s names here, in this place where everyone knows everyone, and nobody knows hers.
Small like the itch you can’t scratch, a tiny little itch yet it might as well be screeching in your ears, “I’m here! I’m here! I’m here!”.

I’m here.

Small also is my hope for the future, and small is my belief that my efforts will come to fruition.
But sometimes at night, after everyone else has gone to bed and Ambien gently rocks my mind back and forth, back and forth, back and forth…And then I do think there’s a little hope for something. There’s hope that I may have the capacity to hope. If drained of all my dark cynicism, my brain might have room then, a little room for true hope and excitement. Late, late at night I think maybe all those paradise things might actually be, someday. Maybe inside me “survival” will be displaced by “life”, and maybe some part of me, long-asleep, will wake up again.
Late, late at night I dream of waking; I dream of shedding the hazy, befuddling cloak of hibernation, forcing myself out of comfortable shadows and into the sharp, exposing light that burns away all the grime, every gray thing that bred in me—multiplying in my soul until it’s entire vision was all but black and white—and then maybe finally, finally there is clarity.

Late, late at night…

Late, late at night I don’t care that I’m the last one up; I don’t care that I’m wide awake after midnight and I could go on a walk—or a run—if I wanted to; if dark things didn’t lurk outside when no one knows that I’m out there all alone. One little lamp in a dark house in a dark field in a dark town in a dark city in everywhere that is dark now, and there’s only my small lamp and I, and I feel so small to think of it. I’m so small the dark things can catch me, easy, so I stay inside and open my eyes wide against the dark shapes that cast shadows darker still. I watch the way the black pushes up against itself in the big empty spaces. There must be empty spaces inside me, in my lungs or stomach or other organs. The darkness must push itself around in there too, like when it’s all pitch black yet you can still see shapes slowly materialize and dissolve, meandering at the edge of your vision. This kind of darkness can seem almost a substance in itself. I imagine, if I were to be cut open, the darkness would seep like thick smoke from the empty spaces in me; would gather up and roll and tumble over the edge of the incision. Harsh light would displace it, pushing it out and it would brush the pale skin of my side as if flowed lightly out and down, finally reaching the cold ground and dissipating, no evidence, no evidence; no evidence that it had ever been.

Natural Course

If you are the tide
And I the shore,
I will let you slip near—
A natural flow,
Inevitable—
Then out again, if out too
Is the natural course.
There would be a little of you left,
Soaked in;
Some baubles left behind,
Slowly sinking
Deeper into me,
Beneath my ever-shifting sands.

But if you are a flood—
An equally natural phenomenon—
And take me by storm with your
Unyielding, stoic weather,
I will let you stay,
And forever change my terrain.
I will allow you to be
All-consuming,
Submerging me, forever
Beneath the soft liquid lapping
Of your new lake.
And if I were to look up,
Through the glassy surface,
Anything I see,
I would see only
Through that lens of you.

Tide or flood
Or streams converging,
Tumbling, merging,
Rushing to some unknown destination
Deemed appropriate by gravity
Where they might divide again,
Or where they may continue
Running in the single element
That once was two.

Whatever happens, this I know:
We were a natural course;
Inevitable.
Nothing else can be
Except what is,
And nothing else could have been
Except what was;
Nor can anything else be,
Except what is coming.