Where We Meet

For now nothing has changed. This is a morning so alike so many mornings, I have lived in this house, it feels too simple even to write down. The dog wakes me at six thirty and I make buttered toast and black coffee. We sit in the chair by the window and watch the water come in and the swimmers go by. Sometimes I write letters, more letters this past year than anything else. The singularity of an audience eases some of the language like oil to the gears.

I will never not marvel at the swimmers out there in the open water with nothing to hold onto. Perhaps it is easier when you face something head on, perhaps only then can you move through it. When I think about this time I am speechless and touching my stomach. I worry I have traded my words for something else, most days I do not want to find out.

I cannot imagine now how it used to feel to love you. How hung out to dry I was in those years. All of Idaho feels like a fever dream; like my first introduction to what it was going to feel like to be me. I have thin memories of a summer in Montana and how much I heart I could have, and cold rivers, and pie out back. Was there pie? I don’t know. It feels like there was.

Just as I will always be interested in the swimmers, I will always be interested in what it felt like to be me. How it has felt to move through myself and become someone else. I know that he likely thinks I am disloyal at heart for the way that I left but it was the most loyal thing I ever did. Loyal only unto me.

I do not have the same capacity for want like I used to. I either have too much or that feeling is saved for the young. I have been so calm for so long it almost worries me. What if the fever has been cured. They say some people build an identity around an illness and they do not know who they are when it is over. I think I built a house around being heartsick and now I do not know how to sleep in my own bed. I sleep too well or not at all. I go down to the water in the middle of the night and watch it come in through the dark.

I do not know if I am being made or undone by this experience. Or where the current is to separate the two. There is a picture I have seen before of two different blues, two oceans where they meet. Separate and yet the same.