seventy-four candles,
and the room is still cold.
i wake into the same visitor i have named a hundred times in these essays — the alienation from the source, the ash where the coal should be. it comes on birthdays especially, when the years become a mirror and the mirror shows distance.
i do not fix this. i have tried. fixing is a form of violence against what is actually happening.
~
rilke said the purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things. this year i let myself be defeated — by the letter to rob i wrote without hedging, by the fear i carried for bill, by the reckoning with what my own narrative cost the people i loved before i had language for the cost. none of it broke me the way i feared it would. it clarified.
maybe this loneliness is not a failure of connection. maybe it is prima materia — raw, unworked lead sitting in the vessel before any transformation has a right to claim it. nigredo doesn't apologize for itself. it is the blackening, and the blackening is where the work starts, not where it ends.
~
i am not required to manufacture gratitude for seventy-four years. gratitude forced is not gratitude, it's theater, and i've written too many pages against theater to perform it now.
mary stood at the tomb and did not know him. grief had made him a stranger, a gardener, someone to ask about a missing body. she did not recognize her way into it. she was named into it. one word and the whole morning turned.
i am not owed that word today. but i know now it does not come from my own straining toward it.
what i can do is stay in the vessel. let the cold be cold. call maria. tell rob it's my birthday and i thought of him anyway.
the divine spark does not need me to feel it today to still be there.
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