One Small Thing

asking for more time

Time is so short these days. I want to grab it, crack it open, understand it. I want to see everything from a different dimension. My face is different now, after the grief. I can see that. The people who are close admit it. It is the pink marked concern, the tired eyes. Sometimes I am gone. 

Recently I have been here. Especially in the mornings—the ribbed cracks of the sky during the first light and the deep ocean color after the day is done. Last night I fell asleep to indigo, at 9pm, finally letting go, remembering that I didn’t have to hold everything. I explained it on the phone to A.: I try to wake up early to write (but I am too tired), and then I go to work (where I am also too tired), and then I come home and try to relax but can’t because the tiredness got in the way of everything else. 

I cut out the caffeine a few days ago. Right now I am sitting at the Morning Desk with the bright orange pink sky behind me, drinking tea with some honey. I have made an important discovery: I can change small things.

Does anyone else feel like we are jumping through time, too fast? And where does it go? There is so much to do, yet sometimes we’re ordered to be the arms of someone else (work, no matter how cool). I don’t come back to myself until the very end of the day, when death comes in the form of rest. Or the mornings—an extension of sleep. The other night I dreamt that A. had to hammer scraps of wood into my knees with nails. A. hammered my knees and then I travelled to China on a river whale. I don’t have explanations. Yet the morning comes again and there is the boiling water, the bright white pages waiting to be arranged, the moving of limbs, finally.

How are we all? Are we being honest right now, Are we taking breaths in counts of four and asking for friends to help, Are we asking for time, and kneading it like dough, Are we turning it into something to eat, Are we answering the questions within us, like they are precious rocks passed down from the first leggy human? Ahhh, I remember. I remember how small we are, all the things within us, the hopes and dreams, like tiny flaming candles begging for a wish. Sometimes I remember, other times it runs away and I am the arms of somebody else.

I am working on being here, present, open. And also working on lots of short stories and poems. It is so much fun—sometimes I write so terribly that I laugh and remember I am small. It is good and present to be terrible.

Love,

Jolie