Evensong VI (31 December 2023)

Come on, I’m thinking. Come on now. Try to hold more than one way of being inside your one single being. Isn’t that some trick?

This might be the way in to the new year with some peace. If you can figure it out.

The New Year.

I sit in the writing room thinking about writing. Thinking about what I know about writing and how I’ve come to know it. I don’t really know anything about writing except how to read. Which is everything. Sometimes I sit inside a narrative and am so moved, so changed by what happens in that world that I have a hard time understanding why people do drugs or drink when books are a thing. And then I remember (just yesterday) digging through the prescription pill bottles in a bathroom closet. Asking my ex-husband (just a week ago, Christmas eve) what kind of drugs he keeps in the house. I don’t even do drugs but there are moments I forget my mind and would be willing to do anything to escape. And I understand this to be an edge of me, the cusp of one way of being that I hadn’t allowed myself to become before, to even know this part of me existed.

When I step to the lip of that new bit of myself, I take two ibuprofen and I go to bed.

Come on. It’s urgent. This is urging. An urging of the self. See the fractures. All the pieces defined. All the pieces of the self. It is urgent to see them. I have an urge, am urging to see. Urged to be seen. All the pieces. All the parts of a self. My self. To write into them.

Come on now. Try to hold more than one way of being inside your one single being.

Try harder.

It is some trick.

In the New Year, all the pieces are of equal weight. There is no good, no bad, no ugly or shameful or stupid or useless or beautiful or illuminating or brilliant or magnetic.

In the New Year, seeing pieces of the self, all the pieces, as necessary to being. Continuously seeing. Learning to live with all of them. Love all of them. Respect all of them. Write into all of them. All the pieces on the page. Continuously.

The page as the self, the page as the body, the pieces as the skin and the heart and the blood and the breath. A sound made to tremble out and echo back like a night mare or a wood mare or a reminder. This is urging. This is urgent.

Come on now. Try harder. See it all. Continue seeing.

Write it down.

Bless the words. Bless the page. Bless the fractures. Bless the pieces. Bless the urging. Bless the self. Bless the continuum.

In the New Year. All pieces blessed. To write the pieces is to bless the pieces is to sing them out. In the New Year.

Fractures as blessings. Singular. Self as prayer.

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