On The Simple

If it were simple it would be simple. But even the things, which appear to happen like they are supposed to, are never as simple as they seem- a heart beat, a birds flight, table salt. The tide comes in and we assume, because it is supposed to, that it will go back out.

Someone tells me, not deciding is also a decision. This feels personal to me.

I spend the weekend in San Diego and get a new tattoo on the inside of my right wrist that says, okay. As if, to remind myself everything is okay, and will be okay, even when it isn’t. While I am getting the tattoo we joke about how we are only in this body for a moment, so whatever about forever, and it serves to solidify my understand as of lately that I am only going to be alive for the tiniest amount of time.

When you cut down a tree you can read the rings, they tell a story. Eucalyptus trees burns from the inside out and Avocado trees bleed red when they catch fire.

There has been now for the past two weeks a small brown bird with an iridescent red chest who sits on the railing outside my window. Today there are two birds.

Sometimes I think we can her each other’s feelings.

The morning after the okay tattoo, I spend the day with an old lover whom I thought for years I would go to my grave still attached to. This was as simple a fact about me having two hands. My love for him and subsequent heart break was one of the most defining stories of my life. If I were tree, he would be one of my rings.

But now, years later, a mild sun in San Diego warms the pavement as we walk and people stream around us. There are sixteen museums and we don’t go in any of them. We instead watch a street magician and then stroll through a greenhouse and read the binomial latin names for plants brought here from islands in the Carribbean.

I am trying to pronounce one out loud and he laughs with me. I see the moment from above as someone I used to be, and am struck with simple plainness of the air between us. My body is just a body. And the story I had lived in and told myself for years was as foreign in my mouth as the words roystonea oleracea. 

Even the things about our lives that we assume will never change, eventually and always do. At some point, the air shifts and the narrative develops and everything is okay. It is not simple, and yet it is. It happens just as it is supposed to.

image by @rebeccaamber