I haven’t even left
It's cliche I know, how time can be so strange, how quickly the months and years can pass. Yet certain hours and days seem endless.
Yesterday, the longest day. If I paid better attention to planetary alignment and the phases of the moon, I would say surely retrograde or return. The distress of students. Various domestic concerns. An afternoon of meetings and commitments jigsawed so tightly, it makes my heart race still, to think of it. And traffic! The unwelcome reminder of a time that I had hoped would not return, or at least not so suddenly and so completely.
This strange in-between state. The temptation to think of "going back" to a way of living, but haven't we learned by now there is never going back? There is only ever wading into the river as it flows, letting it flow.
--
I wrote something many years ago, and when I was asked to respond to the events in Atlanta, to the anti-Asian violence, I thought only of this piece, the events of which first transpired while I was still in college, more years ago than I care to calculate. It retains the carelessness, the looseness of early work, but I like to think that those same impulses contain some of the heat, the anger — of my own youthfulness, of the injury, still fresh. The flesh still tender. "I feel a way about it," is what I think now, but I suppose I did not want to re-voice it. I am so tired. Instead, "I said what I said." Don't we all just keep on saying it.
--
I've reached a milestone of sorts in the novel. I need to let it rest. There are other things I'm working on, deadlines passed or about to, my ambitions constantly exceeding my grasp. And yet, what do we have if not our ambitions? I don't mean the hollow ones. Publication, awards, glossy public recognition that puffs us up, fleetingly, but only just. I mean the ambition of bringing a thing to its fullness. To respond to what the work demands, and to tending to it, with integrity. "I just want to make it sellable," another writer said about their manuscript, and it took decades of impulse control for me to smile, nod, and say nothing. Another gift of aging, of knowing oneself, is knowing when to acknowledge and accept the difference of others. Perhaps I am being unfair, but I wonder what they think the selling of it will do? What it will change? I don't mean to be dismissive, don't mean to suggest I don't have desires.
--
Yesterday, the memorial service of a dear friend and mentor gathered women I hadn't seen in years. I read fragments from a long poem by Rosmarie Waldrop. A generation is passing. Some comfort in being among them for a time.
As if nothing had
started yet
my life ahead somewhere
a difficult interval
too close no matter how
the questions we live in
are always too big
I'm not talking about wind
blowing the mind empty
we are walking to where
our horizons overlap
where the road catches
up with itself and I'll
be where I haven't even left
