Room 400

Have you asked him if he is ok? When the possibility of death passed, have you asked him what it felt like to get to the edge and real back lonely in the back of an ambulance headed through the drizzling peninsula?

There was the most beautiful music and we sit under the convex mirror that the waitress has become so used to that she did not understand the question, “can we sit under the convex mirror?”

Would there be uproar to change the elevator rug improperly to say it is Friday when it is actually Monday, who would be hurt by this?

Feeling seen comes with as much comfort as it does discomfort, there is a hand through the river that leaves none of its own ripple. There is always a tiny ghost. There is always something I do not agree with. You think I talk a lot now, only if you knew how much I held in and how this makes me sick, how this scratches my throat, how this ruins my gut bite by bite. We all hold a landfill’s worth.

I asked him what it felt like and he said, “my brain was a wet phone book being ripped in half,” I cringed physically from the words that entered my ears and then dissolved. I was not been watching his mouth while he spoke. I have been trailing my hand along the curb wondering when I can break all this concrete back down to sand, back down to pebble, back down to earth.

I am uncomfortable now in that I must ‘get the show on the road’ the life old feeling that only I am holding myself back, that only I can do what I can do. And that I hide so much of myself even though I know I can handle being fucked with, I hide so much of myself from some training I have gone through, some force that has shaped me this way. I did not make the bed I woke in. I chose the bed I lay in. I chose these words over other ones.

I chose what I notice, and what notes I skip.

Not understanding that that was a draft of myself that is dead, that I am someone new now. This ‘non me-ness’ that carries the same skin and same name. Who understands the poet that works up hill everyday differently than the painter, differently than the musician, the chef, the teacher. I am not asking for a pedestal I am asking for an opening for complication. I am asking for an all-rightness with no clean answer, an ok-ness with not knowing, a comfortableness with being uncomfortable, a knowing at the same time as not knowing and being terrified of how easy it is to die.