even when you've paid for those sins, even when you've paid

Pistol shot and birdpoint: two tiny implements of death from two generations of Virginians, separated by a couple thousand years. And of course, the tip of my left index finger, another tiny implement of death.

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I have almost nothing worth saying out loud these days, just futile vacillations between fury, apathy, and ordinary despair. The way I've lived the last seven days have probably taken years off of the end of my life. At the same time, there's a measure of grace that comes too. It's like when you think you're going to die, like a tractor trailer swerving into your lane, and part of you is scared, but there's also a part also going "oh, oh well." I have such a hard, practical little heart.


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This week is eating disorder awareness week, according to social media, which was strange timing. It's been interesting to read about other people's experiences. There is a kind of reckless euphoria about it for me during times in which I feel I have no control. Not eating isn't about body image for me or thinking I'm fat. But it can become easy to be addicted to that feeling of perfect emptiness and the way it tightens me into a cold, clear machine. It's not good behavior and I'm not self-indulgent enough to persist with it. I have a lot to do. But it's there.

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Late last night, a ragged yellow moon finally rose up in the east over the graveyard. We were burning a banister out of an old house's once-grand staircase and it had a little round carved sphere on the top that looked strange and livid as the fire took it apart.

My people have been very good to me. There are friends, and then there are the kind of friends who ask to read one hundred pages of your top secret pulp fantasy novel and engage you about it all week because they know you are having a hard time.

*

My front porch feels like a ship's deck sometimes in the breeze. I'm sitting on it right now in the sunshine, thinking and drinking coffee. There was a crow picking on the road, and I went inside and got a little piece of leftover chicken for him. I tossed it to him, and he flew away, but then he came back and very carefully grabbed it. He didn't want to eat it in front of me, so he flew off up into the graveyard maples with it. This was all to make up for that time when I ran some crows off a hawk and her kill. You can't play favorites with predators. I'm supposed to be doing chores or at least going for a run. For the last week, I've run five of seven days. But what I want to do right now is sit on my front porch.

One day, I think I'll buy one of those Do Not Give Up the Ship! flags for it. Until then, everything else.