How to Love a Wolf: A/biding imperfection, May 18, 2020

How to Love a Wolf: A/biding imperfection.

I am napping on my couch. A book rests on my chest. I feel my right hand move across my chest to the top of my left breast. My legs rest on pillows: the right is cocked up and elevated on the back of the couch; the left holding this gripping sensation that stays with me even in rest.

***

I know the light will change. I felt the call to productivity an hour ago and ignored it. The birds exclaim from all sides; obscene in their unwillingness to quiet. I leaned my tissues into that sound, dropping away from focus. The wind chimes I'd purchased last week had arrived. I hung them in the furthest section of my side porch. The windows raised, I could hear them with each moment of pre-thunderous wind. I let the birdsong and chimes merge and drifted into not-quite-sleep. I felt I was being healed by sound. I let the moment continue, my hand on the upper part of my left chest, under my bra strap, drooping like my jaw and right scapulae.

I am awash in my imperfections.

I went to bed early-ish. The rain had started with a fervor that encased my sense of needing-to-do with a blanket of home. I felt aghast at my privilege. My heart raced with the traces of PTSD; my familiar beating; my familiar beat. Still, everywhere smelled of sage and palo santo, and faintly of mint. Something shifted downstairs in the parts of this rented house I don't know, don't venture into, that shift in ways my body has come to recognize at 4am, but that still startle me in the lull of the afternoon.

***

The birds are still screaming. I know the cardinals' call. They come to me now with regularity; they have decided to pierce the veil of my knowing this world with my knowing a world beyond sight. I don't startle anymore when I see them: instead, I ask: what is your message? And they give it to me with clipped brevity. Always forgiveness. Always go forward. Always seek happiness and accept comfort where it comes. They are more regular in my gaze than people: their brownish red, fiery red, muted red feathers. They meet me in town, on my walks, and just outside just now, on the small shrub growing in front of my front room window.

***

The dancers I work with and I started our rehearsals this week. I designed (can I say this?) the process to be as easy as it could be. Strategic ease. Forgiveness. Space for imperfection. And still: we all encounter failure, the leakiness of expectation and time, the omnipresence of obligation to the very things we pledged to disavow. We meet twice a week on Zoom. I prepared by wondering how I might cheat my way to complete the tasks without really completing them. Then, I confessed. We laughed. All I wanted, it turned out, was for the process to be easy, even fun, for them.

But how do we move in a pandemic? We don't know. We place a hand on our breast and wonder if that is dance. We catch ourselves reaching, cutting garlic, scrubbing sinks, letting laundry stay unfolded, encroachments into our perfection and we fight to hold them dear, then toss them out as enemies. Stay in the middle, stay in the middle, I think now. Where imperfection flirts with desire, desire with surrender, surrender with disregard...and disregard with such deep, deep sadness for what isn't and what will never now be.

Tonight I imagined my dad visiting my new home, this rented spot with the groundhogs and deer and delicious, unending plays of light. I imagined him arriving: I heard his inhale and the gesture he does when pleased (actually I did it, felt it, in my body): hand covering his mouth in an inhale of wonder. I heard him praising me and my homemaking (this is a longer, longer story); I heard myself silently say to him, "you're so kind." He would say something like, "Not kind; honest."

***

It took me decades to befriend my aloneness, but that friend of solitude beckoned me from an early time; earlier than I could recognize as time. The evidence is everywhere. Yesterday I found a stack of letters, and then another one, in a storage box labeled 'special notes and cards.' Some of them baffled me: I wondered why I'd kept them; notes from...I can barely say...forgotten notes from a person I once thought I loved [there are no words for these narratives, not yet, and I crumble and know why I dance as these absent-words stick in my mouth.] I read these notes, mystified.

And I read letter after letter that I'd sent to one of my high school mates, a lifelong friend, and someone I still talk with about these things today (literally, today, this day). She'd given me this stack of letters some years back; I forgot I had them; forgot there was a person inside them that I was then.