Bask

So I put on a dress my breasts no longer fill. It's a Tuesday in the dead of summer. Nothing to do but chew crushed ice cubes on the porch and watch the sky darken.

My hair is down - as long as it was when I was 15. There are answers to my ails (just out of reach). I felt them for a moment, as the wind picked up my loose ends. Deliberate, playful energy - electricity - beautifully impersonal. Just the earth recognizing that I was there.

Four years ago, I would have called that God. That inkling of a revelation without expectation. Momentary courage.

I take note of the disembodied lesson in the sky: things can change at any moment. The threat of lightning. "The fire next time."

I once absorbed that truth as a threat. Now I can begin to see it as a promise...

Changeability.

Time is fluid and my heart has slowed. Godless, I am still young. And the rain has soaked my hair through. Today. The only appropriate reaction is to bask (something that doesn't require light). It only requires complete and utter acceptance.

Joy and suffering can exist in tandem.

So I'm learning (always learning) to meet the inevitable risk. The precarity of my existence.

I'm practicing meeting my eyes in the mirror. My gaze is fixed (though tiring) waiting for the cloud to lift. Reinvention doesn't happen in a moment.

For years, I thought of reinvention as an event - transformation in the twirl of a gown. It was a childish hangup, taken from a world of fairytales. I thought life could be segmented as such: innocence to epiphany to happily ever after.

Subsequently, I brushed over the endless, unforgiving middle....when there's no trail of breadcrumbs out of the woods and you can't quite carry a tune, and your gaze is locked on the ground below you. Can you stand? Are you sinking?

When surveying this mass of existence in hindsight, there are pockets of transient worship that emerge and, quite frankly, define my life.

(Licking rainwater off my upper lip, savoring the earthy taste of homemade hemp milk, peeling citrus fruit in a lover's bed.)

Moments of personal sanctity. Indeed, the moments when I felt compelled to sit down and bask in being alive.

Though, I find it vexing that I can only go about authentically sharing my life in glimpses. Whole seasons, reduced to a few gasps for air in a disorienting sea of time.

It makes memoir writing seem futile, doesn't it? For, how can I string my existence into a narrative arc and still remain true to the jagged peaks and imperfections of reality?

I've always felt disingenuous in turning my highest and lowest moments into plot points. So, all I can sincerely offer you, dear reader, is this fractured ode to the middle of a life. My life.

I can tell you about standing in the summer rain - a complete moment of peace. I can tell you about cutting nectarines for my bowl of oatmeal every morning with half-shelled eyes. A sprinkle of cinnamon. I can tell you about the rabbit that spent every July evening panting in my yard. If you're interested, I can recite the intricacies of restless nights, dancing with dead relatives in my dreams.

I can tell you that I've spent the last three and a half years truly convinced that I'm existing wrong. Constantly aware of this inner fault line, something in need of careful mending. I have told myself that one day there will come a fortune cookie answer that forces me back on track and stitches me back up.

But I know that's another childish whim. Magic words to heal wounds. Broken curses.

Despite all the hours I've spent filling notebooks with ink, each page, each chapter, stands obsolete. I can never thread my life together for a complete story. Sure, there are themes of recurrent troubles, a sense of longing, sickness, and grief, but a chasm remains between the memoir and me.

So I've learned to write on the edge of the abyss. Afraid of last words.

"Until," I say. An open prompt, unanswered. The air is cool on my face from up here.

I say 'until' until I forget what I'm waiting for, until the finish line moves or becomes inconsequential, until my voice carries into another plane of existence; a plea. This, too, is hope. The brazen melody of the middle.

So I learn the inward trail of its beaten record. My head spins at times. It's a disorienting journey round and round. I can't say that I always greet the day in earnest. Still, I look forward to repetitive hours of monotonous life - rain and shine - bringing the same well-worn mug to my lips.

You see, I want to truly know this body, this first home of mine. I want to bask in its beautiful inconstancy before I walk out the door having outgrown my own heart.