Fire

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Dale Chihuly glass art

Tell me, why does this one precious life feel hard? Even as my mind plays with the word hard. Is it the right word? Is hard allowed when so many have it worse? Why is my mind a trap that cycles me like a washing machine stuck in the spin cycle? Has that metaphor already been overused? What am I but a complicated metaphor? Even as I remember my friend’s poem that reminds me I can stop pushing the rock up the hill, I push the rock up the hill.

I mean, I switched to the 8-pound weights right as I can’t even imagine what life will be like as my first born needs me in a different way. Should I practice standing still instead of swaying?

This is only half of what this is about. How the older I get the more I ache to find meaning because time, which I know isn’t real, is still running out. It’s as real a thing as anything as the world changes way too fast. As people who are gay can’t purchase wedding cakes at cake shops and children are taken from their parents at our borders. The arc of time is bending into my brain until I need to write. I need to write to try to make myself OK with hard.

This is hard. There I said it. Change is hard. I stand still and watch myself be OK with hard. I’m in a hard place and I’m hungry for joy. Joy is the 8 pound weights and the bike ride with my husband and laughing too hard at the sitcom because my abs are hungry for laughter. What do I want? I want to be a joy catcher. It plays with the seams of hard and makes me really hear the herons chirp as I stand beneath their nests. I rub the edges until I split open my heart. I think it’s the only way forward. You can tell me time isn’t real, that the sun is dying. I can tell you that my high school physics teacher hung a poster that read, “Will the world end in fire or ice?”

Fire. I’m betting on Fire.

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