I’m Not Afraid

Another slow morning. Curled up in the library chair (my “fancy” wingtip, even-if-it’s-just-Ikea chair) with coffee, the news, and the white noise of the space heater. It would be perfect, if I weren’t lathering myself with guilt because I am still not back to the old routines.

I try shifting my perspective from “whipping myself back into shape” to something kinder, but I am stuck in this shallow spot – measuring my worth with calipers. Feeling broken because of my runner’s knee, baker cyst, shoulder impingement, tension headaches. I feel the muscle tension inside my mouth. Like after a long cry that doesn’t quite empty you, there is this bit of metal still screwed into the roof of you mouth, pulling at your teeth, burning your throat.

I know these things I am dealing with are little things. No-things. There is proof of this everywhere I look. People I love are having to pushing through much harder walls and appear to do so without self-pity. But I circle back to guilt instead of moving through. It is my weird, little me-made vortex of familiar shame.

A familiar is a demon that nestles in the skirts of a witch. In the shape of a cat, a toad, or a chimera.

A familiar wasp, maybe.

Sometimes these lower ranking demons are conferred directly by the devil. Sometimes inherited.

There is this attic. Cluttered and dusty. And there is a wasps’ nest clinging to a rafter. It looks abandoned, but you never know and you’re afraid to sweep away the small corpses scattered on the floor.

Why would anyone deliberately go on a bear hunt?

I have so many conflicting shoulds. And a long list of over-due tasks. I have de-cluttered the house that feels good. I can see the floor in the library now. The desktops are clear in the room we once called the atelier. (Ah, best-laid plans.) But there is still clutter in my head that is like a wall full of post-it notes, each without context of any sort, few I remember writing; like a stack of books I need to read, but can’t remember why; like repressed memories of one-night stands, abandoned acute (and costly) obsessions, and all of the what-was-I-thinkings. There is a fog of grief over every thought these days.

Can’t go around it
Can’t go over it
Can’t go under it
We have to go through it