Ten.Four Hundred & Eighty

1. Tiny bird perched on the mini grill. Black feathers. So sweet. I’ve never seen him before.

2. Up early enough to hear the crash of the recycling truck.

3. I see the name again and try to ignore it.

4. But sometimes I get these signs and this is another week of signs.

5. Maybe I am wrong. Maybe it is true that some people can communicate with one another without speaking a word, even across a thousand miles, and time zones.

6. It’s just that a willingness to connect means a willingness to be broken open by feelings. Which is to say that one of the reasons this was shut off to begin with was because I didn’t want to feel the feelings. Ironically, this decision to cut myself off from feeling coincides with a drop in my own creativity. Because, of course, art is a way of dealing with emotion. Art requires a certain kind of connectedness to oneself.

7. I am scared of what my art might look like if I allow myself to sink into the depths of this story. And yet, it is clearly something I still need to learn from and process.

8. Yes, there is a place for the basketball hoop on the driveway. It’s a flat driveway.

9. A glass of Gigondas.

10. I yell at them over the apple crisp. It’s not them that I’m upset about. It’s that my right eye is maybe too tired and the vision is suddenly blurry and this scares me. This scares me because I know that every year the size of my optic nerves increases which means I’m getting closer and closer to needing special drops or medication to reduce my risk of glaucoma. This scares me because I am only 33 and the idea of not being able to see in 10 or 20 years is frightening. But my eye is probably just tired because I wore old glasses instead of contacts, and so that’s probably just it.