Kala

by Colin Walsh

You don’t look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away. MARGARET ATWOOD, CAT’S EYE

Grief is like falling in love; it is always narcissistic. Some catastrophe cuts through your life and immediately you reshape the world to make this disaster the secret heartbeat of all things, the buried truth of the universe.

a growing tree, upon meeting an obstacle, does not stop, or reflect. It pushes itself blindly on, a surge of dumb life eager to continue itself, and it does this, again and again, till it becomes a warp of limbs, and this is how people are like trees; live long enough, and your life becomes a tangle of trajectories, a crooked monument to its own mutilations.

“The world doesn’t hold itself together,” Dad once said. “People make decisions. That’s what keeps things intact.”

I didn’t realize then that the moments when you can say something are just that—moments—and once they’re gone, they’re gone, and you’ve added another brick to the wall.

Your self isn’t some ‘deep down’ thing that exists, away in some other place, separate from your day-to-day. Like, there is no other place. You’re always here. Becoming what you are.”

It takes strength to be open to life, to the possibility things will change for the better.