You'll find me biding my time

When it all falls apart

To be fair, we all drift in different ways. 

Three best friends, two years, then five years, then three years, and the pattern knits itself. I became a drifter too then.

Jackets with fluffy barbed wires, every year, 3 months, five years, 5 months, 9 months, ghost, snooze, seezone, 4 months, block, ghost, delete.

It has been an interesting inheritance to see oneself transformed by endings, and then endings you start choosing. It is not one thing, not one arena, this is romance, and work, and writing, and consuming stuff, and learning, and family, and food, and music, and beauty. 

There was a movie I started watching last week in which a woman who went through a tragedy goes off to a cabin in the Rockies and just isolates herself there, waiting to either keep grieving or die. I didn’t watch long enough to know what she was grieving, but it was liberating to see how she gave up everything to be with her feelings. That is what it really was - nodding to herself that it mattered. It was enough to live for and it was enough to die for. 

I have been in this world the last few years, but I have not fully been here, one foot in another world, always connecting the dots, mending things, meaning making. There were parties it was unthinkable to go to, boys it was unthinkable to reply to.

In my version of hermit mode, I spent time meditating, not realizing then that it was sawing off years of bad habits and technical debt with pure undistilled presence. Sit still on the bed with a 30 minute timer, squirming with discomfort for the first 20 and slipping into a more peaceful last 10 minutes as you listen to the fan spin and your thoughts settle on the floor of the brain. Your car windows can become so clouded due to all the neurosis dredging up to the surface that sitting still and letting yourself be is the only way to keep driving. 

It does not matter now that it was not that serious to the outside world, or that I am writing too much, or that you can see me clear as day. This deserves to be here. It has not exactly felt like sadness, it has felt like recalibration, it has felt like washing myself clean, but sometimes it has also felt really hopeless. 

Maybe it is the sickness of our times to constantly be working towards the next goal, and in the process, always feel like you are enroute somewhere, never really arriving for more than a day or week to a celebratory new turning. The world keeps howling at you in the middle of your grief.

When too the gods of self worth come knocking in the middle of the night, they forget contexts, they forget textures, they forget the sunny days spent sipping coffee with girlfriends at the back of the building, chasing orange butterflies and sneaking off to eat butter chicken and garlic naan. They only remember the trophies.

All you can do is put your head down and get through it. You can write about it to remember it. You can defiantly tell the gods that you listen to your own heartbeat thumping. You can go off to cabins and meditation retreats and keep working when you return. You can bide your time. 

When it comes down to it, the tragedy itself fades to the background. Listen to Mary Oliver when she says: things take the time they take.

You can let them.