on and on

Some days -- not many, because I am lucky -- a damp, dark blanket descends over my head, over my heart, my hands, all the way to my ankles, and nothing is worth doing. Not the work or the other work, not the laundry or the reading, food feels immense and its preparation worse. I can’t see the buds on the tree outside my window, only the deadish brown of its limbs. I fast forward through the parts of TV shows that would ordinarily make me cry, the numb too present then, too everything. I make myself accomplish something at a desk and then cry not because it’s done or because there is always more to do, but because life is so wet and heavy and I don’t love it, I can’t love it, so I wish it would stop. Not forever, but long enough for me to miss it, like a wife on a business trip, so I can love it again and want to live instead of just doing it because there’s no alternative I can consider.  

Earlier this week, when I was under the blanket, my friend took me to yoga, which felt like a difficult nothing, and then I made dinner, which started to taste like something, and then we went to meditation, where I started to be someone again but in the way a baby horse is a horse, but not quite. Barely able to stand, slick and too small, unclear how these sticks are supposed to support this middle portion and the long part way out in front making that sound, seeking something in this sudden world.

Today, I moved laundry from the washer to the dryer on time and it felt like a miracle. Beneath the budding tree, a woman walked her small grey dog without hurry and it felt like a miracle. My knee aches and it’s a miracle. The word miracle comes from the Latin miraculum, “object of wonder,” and mirari “to wonder,” and from mirus, “wonderful.” Today, I’m full of wonder. I hate the blanket, and take it as my teacher. I acknowledge that this is easier because of how seldom my teacher visits. But it’s a miracle, a wonder, to survive anything, to survive the sticky, wet, unpredictable everything of living. To go on and on.