New Animal

But your body. Your beautiful, beautiful body. It clings to you through it all.

I think it's human nature to want to look at wounds. It must be.

I look at my mother. I can feel her tugging at the invisible line between us. Yanking it from afar. The umbilical cord. I plug my belly button with my finger. I miss her and I need her, and she's me, or a part of me at least, and I haven't fully absorbed her yet. I haven't gleaned all the woman-ness from her. Which is what a daughter does. Whose daughter am I now? Where has she gone?

Sometimes I wonder if… I have the ability to be so out of sync with myself that both my body and mind seek to annihilate each other. Sometimes I wonder if all of us metaphorically throw our bodies from cliffs every day of the week.

Over the years I have learned that grief is contagious. You can catch it if you get too close.

Interesting to note my spiraling in real time. Strange to bear witness.

The deceased are beyond beautiful, but only because they are so emptied of worry. Everything tense or unlikable is gone. Like a shopping center in the middle of the night, they have lost all the chaos and clatter.

gone. I wish you knew how loyal your casing is. How your body happily trots everywhere with you like an indebted lover. And it’s you who lays your body out under sweethearts and foes. You. You did that. Because sometimes you need to feel another person’s weight in order to feel your own.

Let me tell you, pet, life is either boring or shocking, there's not much in between.

Shakespeare once wrote that two people together is a beast with two backs

Having a wife and children didn’t suit him, but neither did divorce. He was equally devastated by both, and I bet if you pushed him to remember a time when he wasn’t destroyed by anything, he would stand in front of you with his hands on his hips, looking at the ground for a long time, just thinking.

I can’t relax around repeated invitations to be introspective.