Touchpoints

standing face to face with the memory of it. it misses. it's missing. still. what of time. not more. remains there. misses nothing. time, what is. all else. all things else. all things other. subject time. must answer to time. time dictates all else, except for some. it misses. all installed in time. [p. 40-41]

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If you spend some early decades cataloging your losses, the wounds you have sustained, let the decades that follow demonstrate the deep capacities those wounds have rendered.

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Revisiting Cha as a way to re-open lines of connection past and through. A daily practice: my collaborator and me. We send notes and letters and small objects through the mail. They are carried across town, accumulating time. Each revisitation offers the chance to see again, to illuminate the ley lines.

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This morning, rain. In the early dark, I can hear traffic on the wet streets, a white noise whoosh intensifies and then recedes.

With K., over brunch, when I say, "I don't remember that," she says, "oh that was during one of your disappearances," and I can see it now, the cycles, advance, retreat. Doesn't everyone hibernate?

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I dragged out two boxes of notes for something I thought I was writing. What is it now? Five spiral bound notebooks, two overstuffed binders, a stack of index cards, some torn pages. How wearying to live with one's self.

Notes to past self: Most of those pages of notes are useless, don't write them. Your days of longing and melancholy will become a soft blur. Reconsider. Those perfect sentences you spent hours writing and rewriting will become footnotes or parentheticals to sentences that are somehow more true. Yes, you will circle this same handful of questions for months, for years, for decades. Yes, you are a man standing in a rushing river. You are never the same river, you are never the same man.