The body is the only uncontested home we’ll ever have. Houses can be taken by banks. Banks can go under. Governments can unravel and leave land as spoils of war. Houses are vulnerable to wiles of weather, to capitalist greed of rich displacing those with less, etc. Any building, any land we hold affinity to can be dominated or undone until we no longer belong there. That brings its own special heartbreak…it forces a person to rebuild, resettle. At best one purchases a new place and feels alien in it for awhile. A worse scenario, one settles outside on a different part of town, with sidewalk that’s hopefully safe enough to sleep on but not so high traffic that NIMBY’s call the cops just as your body heat knocks the chill off your sleeping bag. Brutal and also clear that movement to new space is what’s called for.
“To breathe and not combust or disintegrate internally every hour on the hour constantly is plenty.” This kind of thought is never far from me, and I both love and hate my relationship with it. Love, because I know too well what it is like to not have this. Love, because I can always find peace and gratitude in what a miracle it is simply to breathe. Hate, because it feels like such a cheat, as if the closest we get to come to happiness is the thought that things could always be worse.
It is like an anchor that keeps me from washing away, but one that is covered in barnacles and rusty edges that cut as you cling to it.
“To breathe and not combust or disintegrate internally every hour on the hour constantly is plenty.” This kind of thought is never far from me, and I both love and hate my relationship with it. Love, because I know too well what it is like to not have this. Love, because I can always find peace and gratitude in what a miracle it is simply to breathe. Hate, because it feels like such a cheat, as if the closest we get to come to happiness is the thought that things could always be worse.
It is like an anchor that keeps me from washing away, but one that is covered in barnacles and rusty edges that cut as you cling to it.