It still feels like it gets dark early, making dinner and drinking green tea with an old friend from way back who looks like she could be my twin, as we attempt Thai food greatness and ponder earthquakes and the male species and laugh at the absurdity of life.
She teaches music in a small inner city school where some of the kids I used to work with go, and the ones who were struggling the most, who lost their dad to suicide after he beat their mom up so bad he thought he killed her, are her best kids, and they're doing really well and her best students on violin.
I got another phone call from an old friend, but that time in life was so long ago, and I don't know what he wants or even really who he is anymore. We started growing apart awhile ago, when I found myself distrusting his friends for reasons that I couldn't explain but could confirm when a month later one of them shot someone over a heroin deal gone bad.
The last time we talked I was on probation due to my poor judgment in artistic misadventures and he had a few warrants out from several different states for various hippie kid offenses, and I was already overwhelmed with the domestic drama and life in general and never did call him back. It's weird to hang out with someone one-on-one when all of your interactions were in the context of a large interconnected group including siblings and now in-laws almost a decade ago and now I'm much more skittish about a lot of things.
So no, I just don't know, and I don't want to go out anywhere for someone's birthday, and I'll leave my phone on vibrate and listen to soothing sounds of harp music composed a thousand years ago and chants for masses at the end of the first millennium, thinking about how close the end of the world always seems to be, and rework my dud of a lino block into something beautiful.
I find that I don't feel the need for constant companionship, that I am content in punctuated solitude, satisfied by the presence of the divine, finding meaning in ancient truths and timeless words, continually making and remaking art.
I can't process the massive amount of suffering from power-mad despots and tsunamis that stretch from one end of the Pacific to another. My life is finally resembling something like calmness compared to the chaos of last year and the year before, but things can change so quickly. One of my dear friends from my Kent days, with whom I giggled in haiku class and hung out with at parties where we drank tea instead of alcohol and danced to Queen is in Japan right now. I'm so glad she's ok.
I keep on living, knowing that there is so much I just don't understand, and that as hard I try, I'll never be able to wrap my head around it completely... I wonder why I try.
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2 comments:
wondering why comes with being the kind of critters we are, so easily bewitched by grammar, the hard part is making peace with the fact that there are no such answers to be had, at least here on planet earth.
Wondering is all part of the diabolical plan, one more distraction to keep the power rolling, geometrically increasing day by day, we get more and more mad, the synapses short circuit and all is Right With the World™.
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