spring, anchors
It’s summer in Southern California, which is to say that it’s April, a new year, & the sun is my most benevolent lover. Previously, I’d begun this with January. And then again with March. As it goes with the cycle of heat & sun, I’ve found these warm months dripping into each other until three more of them have passed, lazy & bright, almost without notice.
If we abide reality it’s just edged into spring. When my alarm buzzes me awake at 6am every morning the sun is already spilling heat across my bedframe. There is birdsong through my window. I’m still not any better with time.
I’ve been considering anchors lately. In a poet’s workshop she talks often about the concept of clouds versus anchors. My work tends to be very cloud-driven - everything I long for wrapped up in haze & metaphor so that it can only ever be accurately seen by me. I can never just say I love you, come back. There’s a safety in this. [That’s a different discussion.] When considering sex, a lover describes me to someone else as heady. This is, I suppose, true or fair. Even when I’m at my most & biggest body, my thoughts stretch across an insurmountable terrain. It’s exhausting. He rolls his eyes when I lament having too much brain but I don’t take his assessment personally. It was nice to know he talked about me. Even if I wished myself firmly planted in the ground.
This is to say that I’m trying to be more balanced. Say: There was a lover who talked about me, instead of: I swung palm to palm beneath an earthly weight, convinced I would fall & then did. It’s nice to expand upon my own borders, even if the existence of a body & a body’s border implies a once-ago breakage. That’s a different discussion, too, & one I surveil in my free time.
I have very little free time. With all the thinking & working & studying & thinking & dating & thinking &—at the time it was survival. I can’t grieve if I can’t stay still. But now I’m working out space & ease. It’s going better than I think it is, but anything I say on it now will not be as true as anything I say about it later & this is my dedication.
Still, there is so much news & no clean way to set it. Lovers & new friends & university plans & interviews & summer living & heartbreak & poetry & dirt-tinged fingernails from nursing my plants back from their September squall & maybe I’m the happiest about this one. This is what I have. Consistency & confusion & greenery. A small, lucky human’s understanding of time.
