What Really Matters
An entry for week 2 of therealljidol.
What Really Matters
You are not your thoughts
the words are passive on the page
while somewhere
a long-taunt muscle in my chest
quietly folds, and,
breathless and teary,
I glimpse a sliver
of blue.
The meditation app
reminds us to let our thoughts
drift away like soft clouds,
untethered, exposing a beautiful
cerulean sky.
It does not understand
my skull holds a hurricane,
the barometric pressure falling,
Category Four, like Florence,
which bore down
over the ocean and
tight-beamed a path
towards the hospital
where my mother lay, dying -
No - already gone,
anoxic brain injury,
all her clouds having dissipated.
Like static, the physician explained.
Meanwhile, the world moved on
in an apocalyptic frenzy,
marked by canary yellow
inflatable rafts
(her favorite color)
hung in the second-floor hospital lobby
as television news chyrons
encouraged evacuation
over scenes of emptied shelves
and boarded windows,
as if to leave us trapped
with our decision.
The rains and the wind came
later that day, thirty-one inches,
and rivers buried the interstate.
While cemeteries were unable
to hold a grave,
we knew the guilt of her body
lying in the funeral cooler,
generators humming,
waiting patiently for the waters to recede
and our return.
What really matters
when the body is a collection
of microorganisms,
somatic cells, lipids, water, and blood volume,
a steady state of biochemical motion
and replication, layers of a forgotten universe
recycling stardust and stale air?
The lungs expand,
alveoli unfolding like paper cranes,
until they no longer can
(or the breathing tube is removed).
The mind, too -
there is no constant, fixed state
our inner dialogue shaped
by every soul we’ve ever met,
every piece of media ever consumed
taken apart and pieced back together -
we are interwoven, and yet
all destined to disintegrate,
a lifetime of thoughts forming and dissolving,
seen and unseen.
My skull holds a hurricane
of unrelenting pace,
anxiety baked in, full-flavored,
gifted by loss and trauma;
years later, I am a play in three acts
still stuck on repeat -
panic, obsess, breathe.
But somewhere underneath I know
we are not our thoughts -
I am not the tailspin,
the plane swirling towards the dying earth,
the palpitations of a heart that broke
one time too many.
No, I am you and her and myself and
we are the spaces in-between
the stories we build around ourselves,
the glimpse of azure horizon
beyond heavy cumulus sky.
Somewhere below the breath
and grief lies our strength, unyielding,
our nebulous connection to
to one another, the microbe
and the planet -
we are a series of stories passed along
from generation to generation,
finite and infinite,
memory or DNA
that we hold on to tightly,
until we can no longer
remain separated
from it all.
Take comfort,
you are not alone.
Breathe.
~