The Logic of Leaving

 I spent a week in the tundra that is Minnesota and was presented with the logic of leaving and the reasons for returning. I felt my high school wild child at the soft spot in my neck gasping for a breath, after two days home I had opened my mouth so wide that she almost had access to the open air. But I've spent time gaping with her peering out before and know that she tends to steal all my oxygen. I slept in my sisters bed every night our temples touching, willing myself to remember the curve of her neck and the length in her feet, I wrapped my fingers twice around her hair mourning the loss of this sight. I left the tiny block in my heart under the floorboards, something tells me that old and colorful house can handle what I've left behind.

The Tyrancy and Truancy of Time

Thinking seriously about what a trickster Time is and how I never agreed to let him rule my life. Maybe if he had showed up at my doorstep in his winter coat, shivering and asking if he could come inside, I would have opened up the door hesitantly and asked him to kindly remove his shoes. Even if he kept them on perhaps I would have acquiesced to his presence.... or at least if he had asked me out for tea I may have agreed to acknowledge him when we passed each other on the street, but I never met him and I still am not even sure he exists. Though somehow he has a way of winking at me through the windows of this plane as I fly back to Minnesota, and he is beside me when I notice the weight gain of a friend in high school who I always thought was invincible. I hear his inaudible laughter when I shake my head, dizzied because I can't recall ever allowing him to lend his heavy tendencies to me, though he has spun me around to face a decade ago and it feels so close I can almost call it home. Though invisible he is infectious and I wish he would just appear in his physical form so I could finally understand who he his, this tyrant Father Time and what he wants with me, and if we will ever be happy coexisting.

deliciously reckless

These days I have an inexplicable hunger to unstitch the threads that encompass me. The fabric hangs heavy from my collarbones, claws at my neck, dares me to rip it at the seams and let it lay where it belongs, in a bundle in the corner of your room.

These winds so far, it seems, are the only thing that can penetrate these walls. As of late they’re the only thing to rock me to sleep. Like the Santa Anas I believe deeply they are here to welcome change, and at night I lay skin to silk and think about all the changes that just one change will bring. I feel deliciously reckless.

At the same time I am reeling at the openness of these possibilities and this invites countless stomach flips so that I find my diet consisting mostly of black tea and whiskey. My best friend is I-70, my home a scarf flung loosely around my shoulders to ground me, I laugh at the biting cold that whips through my open windows and I don’t turn the radio down until I’m exactly where I want to be. Staying in one place seems impossible; I can’t stand to sit down anymore because I’d rather feel the length of my legs beneath me.

 The wind burns me raw and I welcome it.

The Allegory of the Cave

My hope is to invoke Plato’s placement of a cave, and stand up one day to realize that this binding thing I once knew as ‘right’ was really a chain around my ankles (it wasn’t always a chain but the only truth is change) and what I once saw as shadows are really daring licks of fire and that my heart does have wings because though all are unified sometimes we are meant to be alone.

In Plato’s infamous cave the Freed One staggers across the rocks from Illusion to Belief, by the time he reaches Reason his chains are only a memory and when he finally finds Wisdom he is forced to look directly into the fire that has been his only source of warmth. Though he is accustomed to the wholesome dark and though he feels so terribly alone his bones ache, he also recognizes that he lacked substance before and knows deeply now that nothing will ever, thankfully and most regrettably at the same time, be the same.