On the morning before I leave this place,
the morning after the night I learned my mother had had a stroke
and that was why she was talking crazy like that
in disassembled sentences;
the morning after the day I started a new job remotely
and
the one before I have to get these items in boxes
to move to a life
I understand
only remotely,
I feel the weight of everything, coming to a pressure point in my tense shoulders,
irrational fears
the house will never sell, the job will be too much
or too little
I will never —
Well.
This is getting me nowhere.
So, let me ask a different question, let the pen run on and let me record with all the sincerity I can muster what I’m grateful for, even on a morning
before
and after
all of this.
I am grateful for —
— I am grateful for what I’ve learned about patching cat scratches in walls and door trim.
I am grateful for the patience that’s been required. You see, I always wanted to be a person with patience but was far too impatient to practice. I am grateful for practice I couldn’t avoid.
I am grateful for a quiet mist in the morning after the smoke has cleared and for the man I met one day, outside a butcher shop in Monroe, Michigan. He had his belongings in two overflowing bags; his hair was uncombed, and his sweatpants were falling down.
I am grateful for how his ramblings reminded me that he had a way of seeing the world as sacred and strange as my own.
I am grateful for how it is that worth has nothing to do with what your mind or body can accomplish. It is deeper than that, deeper than what our words, scratching like sandpaper, can ever get down to.
I am grateful for the warm curve of the coffee mug under my fingertips
and for the people who gave me the coffee mug
and also for my fingertips,
how they trace the delicate edges of things,
leaving traces of themselves
imprints of me on the world
I am leaving
I am grateful for this world I am leaving, and for the way that, until my mind goes, memories of it will flutter in like paper in a cluttered room with open windows suddenly disturbed by the wind.
I am grateful for those bits of paper, pizza place on a Saturday night, crowded and cash-only. Box hot on my lap all the way home; the way my father, one hand on the steering wheel, pointed with the other at the sunset hitting the dome of the conservatory.
I am grateful for a second memory — me and my mother under that same dome, watching the koi in a stone pool.
Memories leaving me now, only the momentary flash of a fin on the surface of water, and me back in this kitchen on a day filled with impossible things.
I am grateful for this day filled with impossible things.
And I am grateful for this place that I am leaving now, which was, all too often, no bed of roses, nor anything more, it seemed at times, than trouble.
But in the end, I am grateful for trouble.
Troubled waters carry you swift in their current and trouble rumbles the ground beneath your feet. Trouble picks you up like a rooted tree and carries you off in its whirlwind to somewhere else where you realize that,
oh, and after all,
you were never meant to be a tree anyway,
but rather
this bridge over a stream where a boy plays in the afternoon, climbs on you and whispers all his dreams into your bleached branches.
And so, even though the tilt of it is terrifying, I find that I am grateful this day, for how the world will shift when trouble comes my way.
Leave a Reply