the best pair I’ve ever owned, bought them at the UPS store out of a moment of panicked necessity. I didn’t know how good it’d feel, the clean cut, smooth, as straight as ever. I thought us humans are meant to struggle, always getting snagged up on the microscopic debris. I feel it every morning, the hesitation to rise from my too-comfortable bed. I notice it as I pick up my pen and all words become meaningless, language obtuse. There is laundry in the dryer from last night, the duvet cover a tangled parachute in free-fall, still cold and damp as it hits the ground. I know it’s on me, objects have purpose so much as you use them as intended. Is it my overambition that leads me to fill the washer to the brim, garments large and small, dragging the net across the seafloor? I actually think it’s something different, something that has to do with time and the desperation of holding firmly onto every slippery moment. How is it possible that I feel an abundance, comfortable stealing, collecting, gathering, dry aging on the front end, assuming there will always be room to backfill later on. And then of course the syphoning, a 100-meter sprint, the realization of death and decay. On the dining room table we leave batteries, yarn, credit cards, titanium scissors, all sprawled out like a page from “I Spy.” I scan the surface and all I see is color and form. A leatherbound notebook, how the metal buttons snap into place to emphasize a sense of closure. I’ll shave my beard and say “ah, good as new!” I’ll scrape the garden bed dirt from my fingernails and toss an old salad dressing from the fridge, not quite expired. I’ve noticed silver hairs on my left-head, like a hole in clouds where the sun peeks through. I know that we all move in this direction but I can’t help but feel an overwhelming sense of tragedy thinking about loss. I talk so much about celebration because I can’t bear to consider the inevitable mourning, an essential piece missing from the set leaving the whole thing useless and incomplete. Only now am I finally learning how to love, and you’re saying one day the finch will escape into the sky never to return!? The soft bit of skin under the eye, the freckles on the nose, the morning sigh. “Live forever!” I quietly exclaim as she descends into the basement, “live forever and never leave!”
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