Sometimes you go through days to see yourself through somebody else's eyes. Say a sentence rehearsed in your head and then watch the air deflate from its imagined lift in your head. Your eyes are narrowed, your smile genial, your mind congealed from the earnestness of your imagined acrobatics-- what you do not want to confront is that your earnestness is a function of practiced repetition in the hope that you can regurgitate art from all that you consume. Sometimes you blow your nose and take a deep breath to fill your insides with air--- and in that intake, you hope to have hope splayed out in your insides, from the tips of your fingers to the bristles under your nose. You want to feel the pit of your stomach rise and fall with the inlaid rhythm of hope. Your mind reins you in. Be cautious. Hope can fall through the cracks.
I am most grateful for being able to witness the inner workings of intimate solitude, the kind that cut close to your bones and draws the outside inwards, a reversed cyclotron if you will. Before the pandemic, I didn't know what this all meant-- living through and with solitude in an intimate two-person space. The space isn't cramped but the ruse extends beyond the metaphor. There is the pressure of doing things, ensuring things are business as usual, putting up a front, and then there is the other being inside, who wishes away things in the quest to access an imaginary being-- the kind who can be the epitome of perfection in the middle of a devastating ordeal.
Today I learned you can wish away a scorpion's sting by pasting a poisonous admixture on your skin and then watch the upper layer curdle. There, right there, is your immunity in motion!
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