I’ve logged more experience than most with simplicity and the complexity you discover inside simplicity, minimalism and asocial behavior, endurance and landscape.
Here is the truth: I think some deep wisdom inside me (a) sensed the stress, (b) was terrified for me, and (c) gave me something new and hard to focus on in order to prevent me from lapsing into a despair coma — and also to keep me from having a jelly jar of wine in my hand.
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The plumbing whines with trapped air, dogs outside try to bark off their chains, and I think: how to get used to this earth without you? You don’t visit in a dream to say: it’s OK, I’m 20 forever. You don’t say: I’m high on the altitude. I can’t ask if you remember that Sunday, Central Park: the silence of candles for John Lennon. Or the next day, history class, a note you passed to say we’d marry when my hair touched my waist. And my clever 16-year-old reply: as if the world had such easy lengths. The man who crashed into you offered to buy your mother a new car. Things outlive you: that cheap Chinese restaurant, only one wonton in the soup, that bag lady on Broadway with slot machine eyes, Bob Hope and his TV birthdays. I saw you last in winter, streetlights on at 5, and we walked down Riverside, deciding whether or not to go to a college in a dry town. You stopped me at the window of a nursing home: a dining room of chandeliers, tablecloths, green trays. The old folks leaned over their plates, and the ones who couldn’t manage sat apart with nurses, dropping their chins for the spoon. Stepping back from the window, you said: darkness is comforting — I took your hand. The words froze white and disappeared.
Dina Ben-Lev