lucky

We are the home for a tiny gray mouse and I am told, where there is one, there are likely more. I think I only ever see the same one, poking out from under the stove, or skittering across the hall. Sometimes after dinner, if we are very still, it will emerge and stand frozen in the middle of the kitchen floor for a moment before scurrying off.

I do not want to kill them. Weeks of setting humane traps has changed little. I would like to be able to co-exist with them, although I recognize even as I write this, that it sounds a bit absurd.

Classes have begun, a new rhythm to the days. It is strange to say I have grown accustomed to the constant screen, to projecting my voice into my laptop, to muting and un-muting and so forth. I get dressed now as if I were leaving the house. I darken my eyebrows, line my eyes, put on lipstick. It helps to mark the time.

Despite the continuing isolation, I feel hopefulness return. A sense of porousness, possibility. I am working consistently and well, better than I have in some time.

Yesterday, I received a message from someone I knew in grade school. The last time we would have seen each other or interacted was nearly forty years ago. She wrote a long message through instagram, thanking me for something I did for her in third grade. That I helped her with something. She said she had trouble reading and I helped her. I want to say I remember this moment, but I don’t. She said my help inspired her to be better and she had thought of me over the years, and wanted to thank me. It is strange to think I was in someone else’s thoughts in this way, over time. I’m relieved that there was some impulse I had back then that was generous or kind. The things I remember most of myself in those years would not paint a flattering portrait.

I think too of how, had she written to me a year ago, or two, I think I would have had a different kind of response. This isolation has made me appreciate contact, connection. I think I am more able to accept what is given, hold it.

If we are lucky, I think, life is long enough to accommodate change. Intimacies can evolve. We come together, drift apart, come together again anew. My early important intimacies ended suddenly and without warning. We didn’t have time to move through separation and reunion, were not able to practice the ways that love can change, but remain. To know that in time, and with work, love can contain complexity, injury, forgiveness, witness, suffering and still endure. Can still be love.