on the monsters

I am suspended in time and space. I’m going through the motions of a life that is over, a chapter I have finished. I try to go grocery shopping and end up leaving my cart in the cheese section and walking home. Remind me later of the things I say late at night when the cracks feel like canyons and the skylights aren’t lit. The wandering of heart is a real thing. And I wont remember that later. Joan Didion said, we too often forget the people we used to be. I’d forgotten her, left her out in the rain, told her she wasn’t needed. And now she’s back.

Idaho feels like a title in my life now. I count how many times I’ve seen the foothills change colors, how often the summer fire smoke hangs in the air, how cold the river looks in the winters. I am too close still to write about her. I am still her. But there will come a time where the woman I was being in the years I lived in Idaho is a fixture in my language. She will come to represent continents of who I am. We drift and collide making new land masses and mountain ranges. It never stops.

When I am not feeling taken out at the knees, which most of the time this is how I feel, I am curious at best. I had to think for awhile to find that word, curious. It feels right. I am barely brave enough to peek from beneath my bed sheets at all the monsters in my bedroom at night. But I do. And when the moon shines through the skylight and illuminates the ridges along their back and the curve of their nails, I am not terrified. They are asking me to come to and play, to take a walk around the block. I’m not ready. But I will be soon.