And there’s the first-day-back jitters of seeing my teammates. Some of them I’ve met before, and it will be a nice little reunion. Others I’ve known for years simply as faces in a box on a Zoom screen. As we come together for the first time, what will we talk about? What is the proper response to that simple inquiry: “How are you?”
It’s never really about the things. Delightful distractions, the leather smells rich and the cashmere feels soft but after the novelty of the luxury wears off, we’re all still just electric meatsuits traversing a watery orb, bumping up against each other trying to make sense of it all.
For three years I avoided stagnation by piling on more chaos, traveling, burning through my savings, ending up back at my parents’ house to let my bank account refill. Yesterday, I sent 50,000 carefully culled and crafted words to an editor with the intention of turning them into a book. Those two things could not have coexisted…
I worked fear through my brain like a third base coach gnawing on a wad of Big League Chew. Under the pressure of mental mastication, it shifted shape and took on a thousand new forms that evaded rationalization and neutralization.
Deep within you there is a tiny space that contains the infinite universe. Most people won’t tell you this because if you knew, you’d stop going to work and instead spend your whole day roller blading or skeet-shooting or whatever it is that makes that space light up like a disco.
But if I wanted to know her, it would mean building a mosaic out of the smashed pieces of our collective memories.
There is no wrong way to panic. The world is not black and white, all of us can be right. The fear expression is simply coming from where we fear loss the most, and getting in touch with that reconnects us to ourselves and, if we let it, humanity.
I was, I thought, cool. Not in the real effortless Paul Newman way we think of cool, obviously, but I believed that if I adorned myself with enough physical trappings of cool, I would absorb it by osmosis. Like the giant bug alien (Edgar) in Men in Black, I was wearing a cool suit. And just like Edgar, I was not pulling it off.
A notebook with a green cover like a pool table held accounts of trying and failing to spend less money. It landed on the coals with a sigh, and a hundred pages of angst and sadness went up in flames.
Lushness unfolding Sit still and feel fear’s hot breath. Water fertile soul with saline, nurture tender shoots of self. Let shadows emerge, take shape, begin to dance in the dark. Hang on synchronicity, wring our wounds, let metaphor drip. Trust roots will wrap and hold our guts against the gust. In the misty post-drench dawn, …