Portal #8201

nooo jo! shut up about portals. no I will not

Last week I went through a deer portal after a concert in Nashville, a strange portal in itself, rolling down a misty tunnel at midnight, three hours from temporary home. It made me long for Oregon mornings when I never thought the fog would leave. I took a wrong turn, entered a portal into a highway herd of deer. They were not expecting me. They were patient deer, though, and stood their ground, confused as to how I got to their portal at all, wise deer. They let me pass on safely, all the way to the end.

I have been with A for the last two weeks, hiding from their mad man of a landlord (aren’t they all), making soup, and taking a break from the demands of pressing cider ten plus hours a day. My original plan was to finish reading a book of fiction, something I haven’t been able to succeed at in my grief. I did not read any fiction. I just wasn’t able to, it requires a part of my brain that I can’t seem to turn on (or off?). Which is fine, a person I look up to reminded me.

Here is what’s funny. We are told to sit by the grief, to wait it out. What if grief were a tiger, she said. She means that if grief were a tiger, and you were told to sit there, no way would you do that. I don’t want to sit still and I can’t sit still anyway. The grief inside me, all caught up and tangled inside. It wants to run—so for now I am flying along, oblivious, like a small man with a box over my head. Imagine that!

One time, a long time ago, I was directed to dress up in a body bag and crawl across stage for a ballet I was in. Weird. I have so much left to think about when it comes to those years, but that body bag is always an easy memory. I was a child, on stage, with fabric wrapped so tight I just made shapes, while hundreds watched, and now I am a small man (of sorts) with a box over my head, running, because there is a tiger of grief in my room.

Funny.

Death is funny and terrible. Terrible because it agonizing; funny because I have this hunch that we all share a commonality on the naivety of human death. We know so little, yet declare so much! Though I am declaring that death has wrecked me; though I have lived and continue to live as though I am not wrecked. I live to be wrong. And all the deaths that still live in another place: heart break and past lovers and war and silence and lifting yourself up out of the old pruned mattress for the first time in hours, days.

I come back to death a lot in these newsletters and every time I do, I worry that people will…worry… about me. Funny. Death has taught me so much and also absolutely nothing at all. I declare not to know; it will change either way.

She said to me, after explaining that grief is a tiger, that one day I will find stillness again. I might even read a book one day. That is nice, I think. Not the sitting or reading part, but the portals we go through to end up on the other side, a new side.

Have you gone through a portal? I am going to do some portal data collecting. We could make a portal together, a new one.

Love,

Jo