A wall of gray clouds advances like a column of soldiers on parade marching down the wide boulevard of sky. It’s been threatening to rain the way summer days threaten rain. The dog was good on our morning walk. He ignored other dogs, and even walked closely by a rabbit and didn’t try to chase. Or maybe I just wasn’t focused on all the ways our walk could go wrong. When I’m not focused on those things, I can see a neighbor’s grill and be reminded of cookouts, and I can slow down as we pass the sweet smell of honeysuckles in early bloom. It might have helped that I read a few poems, and no social media, before going on our walk. I might have created a frame of mind receptive to the small wonders of the outside world and reverie.
Last night I dreamed of failure. I was sick to my stomach with nerves over the things I hadn’t done for an in-depth history class on race in early America. I only read part of one of the chapters in a three-chapter major exam and I didn’t finish the paper that was due. We were approaching the end of the semester – I was screwed.
This morning I attempted a poem about the anxiety of shadowy steps seen in the light from under a doorway. My initial thought was a type of giddy anxiety – the kind that comes when kids play games like hide and seek… the kind that accompanies the quick bursting in of an a-ha gotcha, or the slow walk in of a parent announcing who they’re looking for…. “I wonder where he could be…?” But that wasn’t the poem I wrote. Instead, I tried to imagine a different type of anxiety, one born of terror in the night. A child forced to bear witness to abuse. Maybe a brother with a broken arm or an eye gone purple where a ring broke the skin. A sister too young to know the weight of men and the smell of sweat and booze.
This, too, was before the walk and maybe primed the pump for seeing a world of color and full of morning birdsong. The neighborhood is quiet at seven AM on a Sunday. As we turned the corner on to the gravel road leading to the house, I began to wonder if I might miss it, this quiet – especially if I took up city life where it can be hard to find some peace. I’m not entirely opposed to suburban or semi-country life, but it seems better when it’s shared – and not just with a dog.
On my walks yesterday and today I’ve been wondering, almost imagining, what that might look like. How might sharing time play out? The last time I really attempted something like that, I found myself wanting to give all of my time away – and sometimes being offended if it wasn’t reciprocated or respected or taken as the gift I intended it to be. I would have spent every waking moment with this person and was disappointed when she chose or wanted otherwise. And attempted is the wrong word choice there. Our spending time together, lots of time, started out naturally as something we both wanted. It wasn’t something I actively sought out. For me, being this way (wanting to spend my time with someone else) was the difference between necessity and preference. I didn’t need to be with this person, I just preferred it to every other option. From a poem I read last night: “Each morning we worked together / apart. I in my downstairs study / and Jane at her rolltop desk” I think my preference to experience together as much of life as possible was felt as an overcrowding and was, in the end, mis-characterized as being needy.
Fearing it was true, I may have gone overboard in trying to prove (mostly to myself) that it really was a preference and not a need or fear. I’ve spent the majority of these last two or three years alone in this quasi-experiment and stubborn proof only to get back to where I was before. I don’t need company, but it’s nice on a morning walk… it’s nice to have the additional input when the rain doesn’t come and the clouds give way to sun and you have a world of choices on how to spend the day… because deep down, you know that no matter what you choose, it will be made slightly (or entirely) better by the company you keep.
That’s what passes for a post this morning. The sun has come out and the world is mostly birdsong.