Indulge

My friend sent me poems.

At first I read them with a critical eye, reserved for my every day job where I break apart text to get to the underlying problem so I can solve something. 

It really has been too long since I’ve read poems.  

I forgot all about the flow and the feel.  I had to work to experience them, and that is not a commentary on the poems themselves (they were decent, some of them had parts that were downright delicious) more that I have been lost in this sleepless whirlwind where very little light gets through.  

Sometimes I lose the source- this is the longest it’s been gone- living without doors, pulling myself out of a rut.  I realize how human I am and how normal life is and how the magic is always in the effort of seeing.  It takes so much work to be awake.  It is always a fight to find the real immediate moments, to be in the now, but it’s harder than ever with so much on my mind and so many worries at my back and so many things left undone-the loose ends of the house following me down into sleep.

I felt the same way about the words that I do when I watch dance:  I ache from the explosive beauty of the art, but also from the insecurities that mount themselves inside me.  Will I ever write again?  Will I ever move my body again?  Nothing has to be the same as it was, but will it ever be again?  And in this moment of stasis, can’t I be moved by others who are working without fear instead of paralyzed further by my own thousand empty pages? 

The first "environment" Colt ever built me was in his closet.  After work I rode my bike to his apartment where he'd collected tree branches with leaves and layered them across the top shelf of his closet, covered it in white christmas lights, and stacked pillows against the walls.  When I walked in, he said in this beautiful naivity, "I built you this environment" with the lights creating leaf shadows swaying around us on the walls.  The next day, my friends and I joked about it.  They couldn't believe how outlandish the whole thing sounded, but while I giggled with them, I was taken aback by the deep romance I felt about it.  It was sweet in a way no one had ever quite been sweet to me before.  Tonight after I read the poems and was swallowing my inferiority complex, Colt built me environment-two in the only room where we can close the door, the bathroom.  I know this sounds crazy, but he lit a candle and layered the bathtub with towels and pillows and made me hot tea and closed the door so I could write in private, with the click of the keys echoing around me.  I need at least the feeling of solidarity to read, to write, sometimes.

  

I have truly missed poems.