Poetic Distance
Bend, Oregon, 2022.
As a child, I learned early on about the merits of seeing the world happening around me and to me from a third-person perspective. [Julia goes to first grade and meets the parrot that eats her lunch.]
The space between the subject and the action has enough emotional silence to produce an observant mind. Making me the poet, and my muse, the distance. [Julia hides quietly in her room when she hears that her father has arrived from work. There is ice in her heart.]
Throughout my life and up to this very day, I have observed me observe things. Marveling at what brings joy and sadness and holding on to the understanding that this, all of this, shall pass. Sometimes I am more successful at swimming in that sacred space of quietness; other times, I am what is happening to me. Poet and muse, undistinguishable. The paper that cuts is the finger that bleeds. [Julia walks down the aisle, still a child; her dress is white, and all of her life is packed in two suitcases. She does not look back.]
I think things would be easier if time stopped accelerating. I remember so clearly the summer days in Brazil. An afternoon felt like a week. Lazy minutes suspended in the air like fruit flies buzzing around an overripe fruit. The sweetness of it all was almost too much to bear. A sticky hot perfume that smells like something isn’t right made people feel drunk and slow, walking through molasses is nothing when compared to walking through a hot Brazilian square in January. In fact, I have this theory that time runs slower in the lower half of the planet. Maybe the heat makes gray matter cook in its encasing; everything feels like a chore, so why bother? [Julia moves to the North, the most northern part of America. She sips mochas from Starbucks and wears a hand-me-down coat. Everything is fancy and new. She looks at the wooden houses as the rain falls for months on end. She feels the cold chill her unprepared bones. She speaks no English.]
And yet the hands of the clock keep on turning. Incessant little circles, ticking the blinks of eyes and the beats of hearts. Each minute has its allocated number of seconds, but one could swear that dark magic is at play, for yesterday was five years ago. [Julia names her child William. William names himself Will. Julia and Will learn to speak English. Julia and Will go to football games, picnics, emergency rooms, and movies. There are graduations. There are car accidents. There are recoveries. Tears, laughter. They grow closer, even closer from the time when he lived inside of her.]
At some point, growing up can no longer be delayed, and off to work one goes. Ten-hour days for years and years. Building and learning and expanding. Promising unearned experience and delivering grit. The kid hiding in her room now stands in plain sight. The inheritance of intelligence from the long-dead patriarch unfurls like a DNA strand, connecting opportunity to possibility to realization. [Julia accidentally becomes a business owner. She didn’t ask for it. It was the right place and the right time. It was a woman that opened the door. Julia walked through and started to build.]
How in the world are we already in the mid-forties? I don’t know. I have been heads down tending the things I have given birth to - the child, the work, the roses and peonies, the homes that have sprouted out of imagination, the love that has continuously flown from me to you and you and you. I realize that blood, sweat, and tears are not figurative; I feel the heat and the exhaustion, and I taste the iron (and the irony.) It seems like it is the right time to slow down a bit, read more books, perhaps sip a whiskey in the evening, and retrospect. I can’t. So I push forward. I reinvent and run and ride; I break plates and cups so I can eat and drink from new ones. [Julia races and climbs. She jumps on planes and goes far, even for only a day. She breaks bones. She laughs at the pain, and then she cries. It is the fire dragon within that needs to spread its wings.]
And now a pause. A pandemic. A world suspended by grief and disbelief. A world unprepared and ignorant. The things that seemed important are forgotten as the unimportant things they were. People lose people, and people find people. The world is both large and small in a way that feels freeing and constraining. This man turns back to his family and sees in them the treasure he thought was lost. This woman realizes time is wasted; she starts new, nothing but hope in her pocket. There are no rule books, and worse, there are no guidelines. Our best is all we can do. In the midst of all of this, I feel something re-emerging… I can’t quite put my finger on it, but then I realize I am again observing. Seeing me in the world and seeing the world do its beautiful thing. I am finding my muse again, getting comfortable in the silence, detaching a little from the mundane occurrences. The poetry of it all is humbling and overwhelming. Inspiring and scary. It uplifts me while also tossing me into uncharted waters. Where will it all lead? Only God knows. [Julia starts to write.]