Sometimes you hear something that sounds like the thing you always wanted to be true, and you wish you could fold the words of it inside you and nurse them into full release, winged and alive, even when they land with the weight of the dead. You wonder at the animation of the severed appendage that does not know it yet.
A lifetime student in the practice of devotion makes me disposed toward believing against what some would call my better judgement. The weakness comes from being honed toward reframing the unseen, from nothing and just an illusion by a lens bent on recognizing both as possible sites of some becoming still dark. This tendency has invited a great deal of trouble. I still don’t know what it all means. I suspect I won’t, ever.
How often I might have died by the hand of who I thought might yet live. This when the vessel by all accounts (including several often-repeated sentences), seemed bent on killing me. I am frightened, looking back, to accept how little this frightened me. I wanted only what I always wanted which was to heal the wound of severance from her origin, but I had misunderstood the equation. I remembered only part of the delivery, and repeated its final words. Take this body, I thought, and meant it, meaning to emulate the prayer I most revered. I give it up to you. I did not think any further, about my rights in what I gave and to whom, and my responsibilities for getting both right. I thought if I could get the giving part over with, I might be saved. I was profoundly wrong. Even the self-professed sufferers, it turns out, want the easy route––[strike that/ rephrase to avoid diluting responsibility]. I thought if I could just find a way to give it all away, the rest would follow. Awareness of this leaves me poised to accept that in any given moment, I may be profoundly wrong. A fact that either aggravates or sustains the situation. I am not sure that I will ever, in my current form, be able to tell which.
Giving it all away is one thing. Being careful about how and when is another. To be human is to be suspended in constant limbo until death, between the not-yet, the undead, and those other, transcendent states. So am I.