science experiments

In the end there were large swaths of time I decided to leave untouched– left out frostbitten and sunburnt. Mostly I decided to stop taking everything apart to examine it from the inside. I thought it might by nice if pieces of us still looked good to me– memories preserved in glass jars up on the shelf like science experiments. I read a book bound in a blue cover my roommate dug out and miraculously handed to me, I carry it around in my purse and read it in public places, and in my bed for those first few early and hard hours of every day. It told me, you have to let go of the life that was in order to make room for the life that is. I think about it a lot, how attached we get to people and ideas of the future.

I was in a bar last night having dinner with this strange cowboy I used to know in another life. I used to sing in this bar before I left this town. And I had a moment in the bathroom mirror, where I used to talk to myself before going on stage. I saw myself and I realized had I known two years ago, the last time I was in this bar, what was going to take place for me I would have held myself underwater because the future is far more fascinating, terrifying, and wonderful and painful than we can possibly imagine. There is no point in pretending or trying to understand what will happen next. We try to keep ourselves from being hurt or from holding onto things for too long, we try to mitigate pain and make sense of things which make no sense. We try to be good people, good to ourselves and good to those we love. But it’s hard. It’s hard to be good and true and right, and the most we can hope for is some truth and love in all of this.