Playworld

by Adam Ross

If we only have love Then tomorrow will dawn And the days of our years Will rise on that morn If we only have love To embrace without fears We will kiss with our eyes We will sleep without tears If we only have love With our arms open wide Then the young and the old Will stand at our side

“Here’s the thing,” he said. “You know more about your feelings now than you will know ever. Swear to God. Something happens to you, say something good or bad, it doesn’t matter, and you let yourself feel it, and because it’s practically the first time, you don’t rationalize it or analyze it or overinterpret it, it’s just the thing itself. You don’t build a shell around it, it pierces you, it enters you, and, swear to God, if I could go back in time, you know what I would eliminate? What I’d lobotomize from my brain? The future. I’d let myself experience everything as it happened like you do now instead of wondering like I always did. Why isn’t this some other way instead of that? When will things be different? Better? Will they get worse? Do you understand?”

“It’s complicated, what I’m trying to explain,” he continued. “It’s inside-out thinking, but if I could communicate it, you’d realize that right now you are the most honest that you will ever be, and if you could somehow stay that way, then you would triumph over life, swear to God, because at some point soon, and maybe it’s already happened, you’re going to get hurt badly and repeatedly, small hurts over and over, things you don’t feel right now, like tick bites or leeches attaching to your skin. You’re going to stop listening and feeling and instead start making arguments, every day of your life asking yourself what isn’t instead of what is, and then it’s all over already. You’ll think you’ve bitten the apple, but really the apple’s bitten you. Your argument for what isn’t becomes the world and you become the argument and then it’s already happened: the beginning of adulthood.”

“You’re saying something bad is going to happen to us?” Cliff asked. “Something bad happens to everyone,” he said. “Except it’s not bad. It’s just something. That’s the trick. Recognizing it’s just something. That’s the difference between pain and suffering. Suffering’s the former and pain’s the latter.”

What I felt was not soreness, although there was that in my neck and arms, but rather an overwhelming fatigue. It was a cousin to sadness, closer, in feeling, to guilt.

So maybe that’s what you’ve been put on the earth for. To come up with a language for your life.”

Just because you stand your ground doesn’t mean you’ve won the day.

do difficult things. That no one can take away. Like a sauna stone. But it’s more precious and magic, really. And it’s always there when you need it. At least, that’s how I’ve come to think about it.

he said to me that we process all trauma like the oyster. We pearl the dangerous particle, if we are lucky, into something precious, into the gift.

I was taught the indelible lesson that, to arrive at love, I must suffer through someone else’s idea of it. And yet even now, I resist the notion that we are reducible to our wounds.

“It comes from decidere. It means ‘to cut away from,’ like a boat from a mooring. A decision, then, is simply the beginning of a journey. If it seems fateful, it’s because it is. If fateful seems too heavy, subtract the weight from it by recognizing you will make countless such decisions in your lifetime.”