Here comes a familiar question. So now what? It’s the end of the long part of the day and the beginning of the part where I mean to redeem some of the best of me. But the glass is empty too soon, and here’s a challenge. If I don’t rush past it, a response waits. Saying, now you try to make. Something, but not today. Today I want to open the notebook, the laptop, the inbox and find it already made.
In the Mass, there was a moment after the bells and before communion that some called the High Point, where we said I am not worthy to receive, but say the word. It came after the part where my grandma would whisper, Lord, I believe. Heal my unbelief.
I return each evening in a diminished form, somehow. Determination is not the posture of prayer, but of the glossy ad. It makes demands, offers vapid encouragement, relentless goading on. Get yourself together, this part insists. How can you be finished if it isn’t even dark? How when others are just beginning, can you be done for the day?
True, this day started at four, and then came everything I will not list. I mean to get beyond all of this. Here comes Dante again, interrupting a line of thought with whispers of how the dark wood were better followed, translated. I am inclined to agree, but keep finding concrete corridors, fluorescent track lighting, deafening bells. The railings and the gates and the traffic keep me moving over leveled ground, but airless, crawling in this steady stream. I eddy again among the bent ones, each of us shouldering the rest of the day forward until it turns on an eventual collapse, and comes back for us, again.
