Sea And The Rock Below

It's too much, sometimes. She sent me a text about it and I in disbelief and hoping for some innocuous answer to just explain it away checked the chronicle and the sickness that ensued. The feeling of lead in the pit of the stomach, the downgoing, and the thought of the loved ones who could be and are in those shoes every day during their eight hour scope of practice. This complete and total farce, this thing we lead called life. This thing that leads us. She can't choose anything else, so there is no good done in grieving the point. And he leaves three children just too much like us, and I can hardly believe even, if a day exists that I will wake up and she will not also be doing so. I do not think it morbid to wish for a car accident at 85, maybe on the dunes in Michigan, me the navigator, her the driver.

I don't know what you do the next day, the day after, when you wake up. And the gravity of the thought that there is nothing we can do about it now, you still have to wake up, there is still this earth and things to do. What would you be? A little wisp of a soul inside of a corpse. Saint Michael, please watch over my blue team with a ready sword. Oh little weary soul. I never think about the job that actually has to get done. I want to tell the Kerstetters something so important, but the words are just flat and weak because they have already awoken again and put bare feet down onto that very totally unfamiliar carpet in a bedroom that is ugly awful hollow for the memories and what would you do with the pillow that still smelled like him? Wash it? You couldn't bare to do so but the smell would haunt you like a ghost and rip your heart every time to a million pieces more than the time before. Impossible even to imagine.

This ocean dissolving my kingdom of rust. Holes poking the sunlight through and onto all of the spots I want to ignore, this life that is so far from solitary. Just, thank you. If I haven't said it. Can't even imagine.

NREMT-P

I used to talk to myself. That is to say, the me I used to be would hold conversations with the me I am today. I remember so clearly, sprawled out on the kitchen floor in that apartment we had on soroya court, green butcher block shards surrounded me as I stirred sweetened condensed milk into safeway coffee. The world was so accessible then. Exciting. Full of promise. The Moscow Boys Choir contained a set of magical lyrics that you could only hear if you really strained yourself and if you already knew they were there. I have either grown so cynical, or much too far removed from those conversations with myself. The forty year old me, what does she look like? What are her dreams. Myzel, will she still think of him perched on a grassy August hill, late sun kissing the wild strands of hair as he fades into the distance?

Forty. We sat across a plate of chips and salsa when he told me that his taste buds aren't as sensitive as they used to be. "Well," I said laughingly, "you are pushing forty."

You musn't start thinking in those terms. If x equals y and you add z plus x, you will certainly arrive at v! And it startles me to think that the whole system that we all believe in supports that idea, that very idea which of course does not equal life. That anyone with any amount of living can tell you with great certainty does not equal life. There will always be salesmen, bankers, janitors, secretaries, etc. To break out of that chain of thought all together, to no longer be an organ stop, that line of thinking that fear gives birth to... oh, this line of thinking, this great thing I have tried to come to, the journey ... cowardice is peppered throughout ... to stop, perhaps caring even what I think, going into a thing. There is no better advice than your own that anyone can give you, and it is the last you seek. Can you imagine such a thing!

It is nearly summer. Little excites me beyond the smell of diesel and watching the hands turn into little automotans. This imperfect creature. There is not a thing I would change.