desertion

Today, I watched an middle-aged woman hug a gravestone. She wrapped her whole body around it even though she was not very large to begin with and the sheer size of the stone made her look tiny. She pressed her face against it. I was close enough to see her mouth touch the granite. She wasn't crying, she was just hugging it like she needed to hug that person and that person was now a stone.

Today, I stood in my hallway because my cell signal was spotty, and even though previously I had been sobbing like a child and tried to hide it to talk on the phone, the woman I didn't know from the "Report Lost or Stolen" branch of my credit card company made me laugh. We started talking, telling stories, and then we couldn't stop, but she had to keep going with her script. So she'd get a little ways into it and then burst out giggling, and I'd start again, and it was all really nice.

I'm tired and feeling a little desolate. I've been reading Cold Mountain, and I can't help thinking the central theme of Frazier's writing is men.So I've been thinking about men and being quiet. I think I'm smarter than a lot of what I've been feeling, so I'm going to skip all the exposition. I'm a little sick of my labels. The week isn't going great, but here I am, up late, licking this day from my fingers.


See? The knife I carry?
It cuts my smile even wider.
-The Good Fight, by Ada Limon