A Year Later

This time last year, I was going out of my mind. Even had a bad mushroom trip on my birthday. Bad idea out of the gate, that one.

What stands out is how anguished we both were, for same and different reasons, just a short time after I bought the new journal and wrote that first in decades poem. I remember the uncertainty and the blind trust that was so liberating.

I remember telling you how alive I felt, after you took back the curse, you confessing the same sin, feeling alive.

I like this better, this breathing room, an ebb and flow rather than a hurricane that sucks the bay dry. And it was a hurricane—I doubt anything could have stopped it. And now we both know the price of my knowledge, the price of love. It was hard to carry by myself all those years, but I shouldered it, knew it wasn’t something to leave on the side of the road like the last tenant’s trash to be picked through by scavengers.

I’m sorry that picking it up nearly crushed you, threw your whole life out of balance, throwing you into the abyss of existential crisis. You thought I was dancing on the precipice to mock your fall from a fragile fantasy, but it wasn’t that.

You needed to know that I survived, that you could, too, that there’s still a reason to dance, that once you find the bass line, you never lose it; it survives the incessant treble screeching ever louder, more shrill, until it becomes a dog whistle, irrelevant to ears that understand depth.

That’s what we have—depth. It doesn’t need breadth in the conventional sense, mocks it in its own way, knows what’s real. I’ll never abandon you, nor will I interfere with your very real needs that aren’t my own, that I don’t fully comprehend but respect nonetheless.

You’re my ocean, and I’m your moon. It’s okay that you can’t always see me—sometimes I have to hide to survive this wretched earth coming between us, casting my shadow on you. Sometimes the distance is necessary.

I’m fine here in my own orbit, visible yet removed from all of those mundane terrestrial concerns. The eclipses don’t last, and I’m comfortable with my phases of waxing and waning on my own time, my days having their own length, my years shorter and faster, yet still keeping time with the big rock. We have found our paradox of stasis.