How to Love a Wolf: June 4, 2019

How to Love a Wolf: Day 3

I am finished my PhD and have returned to my small Philadelphia place after teaching the semester in Ohio. A wild semester. A wild thirty years. This month, back, sort of: finished with a life chapter and starting another, and reliving yet another. I sometimes wander my small apartment in a reverie. It is as if I am in the home of someone who has died, is permanently absent, exists in a past. I know her so well; but still she kept secrets of sorts, like written priorities dashed off, then forgotten or discarded, tucked in small piles of notes; on post-it notes or envelope-backs, formal pages torn from well-intended journals. Missives from the person I was, that person, to herself. A self gone; the notes now collected by me, a welcome interloper, clean-up agent, solver of secrets.

She is gone, but still here in her forgotten notes and accumulated belongings. I happen upon them. I lift them with calm curiosity: a folded shirt; charcoal and frankincense resin tucked in an organized drawer; sorted but unopened mail. Belongings, accumulated in the haste of a laser, sole purpose (writing the dissertation), the panic of packing (multiple guest professorships over three years); or scrambled up and stuffed in the corner in the ache of loss and unfinished wondering. Also: repeat items meant to fill perceived gaps now appearing as senseless multiples inducing of shame, object overwhelm. How many methods does a person need to brew a coffee? How many black t-shirts, dresses, sweaters does a person need? This list goes on, yet there is no clutter. Just the suggestion of multiple people trying to organize a space made for one.

My body has lost something, too. A desire to shape? A need to prove? A wish to present? The fuel of escape.

It is as if the ego of my flesh raced ahead on a trajectory of evolution, ahead of the ego of *this* person, still alive, and left me here unfolding notes as if I found them windswept and curled into a bottle that was tossed into the sea. Time is the sea. No. I am the sea. Time is the bottle. Its origination unknowable. The notes: I save them. I know they will mean something someday: I don't want to forget this liminal me caught between caring and giving exactly zero 'fucks.' Surely I will need these 'fucks' someday. Surely.

A smooshed together set of two light blue post-it notes marked with a familiar hand, no date: "new terms" she wrote; "bra-less space for movement" "SPA, etc. (yes, with results);" "25th anniv" (underlined); "restart/mark is about forgiveness;" (as if a future me might forget). I shake my head, baffled: I want this "SPA, etc...with results."

An ill-folded page torn from a college-lined notebook. Scribbled: "Body." "Really about all the people gathered." "Bodies and thinking about bodies evokes:

tenderness

vulnerability

fear

possibility

grief"

A sketch for a tattoo; a secret coded swirl of letters.

Today I took Yoga in the studio. Everyone knows I struggle with Yoga. I promised myself I would do only what I wanted to do. And I did that, but I did it just a bit more than usual. There was a moment when my breath and timing and body were moving so slowly, smooth and even like I move in water, but so very slow—like time was hesitating in itself. As if in a dream: completely off-kilter with the rest of the class, but on-kilter with myself. I heard the teacher give an instruction and I stayed—instead of following or catching up or feeling the microscopic catch of apology in my tissues—in my smooth evenness. I thought: this is what it feels like for it to be okay to not do what I am being told to do. To "disobey." To not be afraid of the repercussions. To not measure my value against the stick of doing what was directed, asked, insisted. As if in a dream. (I feel now the extreme privilege of my words plain on the page. I also feel the history and lock-down embedded in their private, contested origination.) My body hurts, I think, back on the mat. The feeling is not new: a dusty installation in this museum of myself I have been wandering through in a reverie, picking up accumulations.