The Space Between the World and Me
Tomorrow. When is tomorrow? Why can’t tomorrow be today? Is patience really a virtue or does it keep me idle while today passes and tomorrow becomes an inevitable conclusion? The virtue of patience clarified by space and time has surfaced its core tenet of discernment. It is the echoing call returning my screams into the abyss. So, is my intervention upon the universes process just my anxiety staging its own off-Broadway plays? Are the butterflies fluttering within my belly searching for freedom rather than an expression of liberated love? Were they merely escaping from the familiar heat of fires past, ignited by the face of recognition?
Healing aches with patience seems to be the timeless answer, always. Sit in it, wait, let it move through you.
How do you stay when the tunnel echoing your voice is blocked by a landslide of shock and betrayal? How do you sit in it when the it is the scalpels of self reflection warranting a pause? How do you feel the sensations of emotion scaling your nervous system, moving at what feels like the pace of a caterpillar climbing the Empire State Building? Stay, a psychosomatic request that ignites my endurance muscles to pace themselves and withstand but never to look up and out at the horizon as tomorrow rises over head.
Tomorrow always arrives anyway. Instead of wavering like a weeping willow in the wind, I breathe…and stay.
Impatience is my unwilling accomplice in the waiting game. The journey unravels endlessly, my eyes fixating on a point that seems to never close the space between us; the space between the world and me. Sprinting towards the sky, my toes melt into the asphalt. Aspirations are not the wind beneath my wings but rather the weight of down pressure landing my plane gently and unceremoniously. Survival’s coercive pressure is an eager undertaker for dreams. Resources and exclusivity curate a members-only legacy club. A collective crafting bylaws written in the words of radical imaginations though enacted by the sleepy middle managers of hierarchy and prestige.
The walls encasing me challenge my will to run through them. Walls and will, a constant negotiation and contest for might.
My head and heart have fallen out of love, unable to conceive a respite from deep disappointment they’d rather part ways than give up my will. I now wear a perfume with a top note of rage that masks the musk of fear and anxiety. Fighting a battle underwater tied to weights, I contend with the walls and will volleying my body like the somersaulting waves of the Pacific coast. Love alone is not enough, love cannot save me here, I am succumbing. I am surrendering once more.
A weary spirit is a restless one that will not find relief from forced stillness.
It needs the familiar inevitability of gravity extending permission to shatter. It needs to trust that space will contain the pieces. To be tethered to the world with enough slack to unravel and wander through the stars guides rest in, allows the weight of patience to shutter eyes, and settle the anxiety sprinting across neurons like ping pong balls. Tomorrow then becomes a new today, a new beginning. Though the unknowns continue their relentless march like southern humidity in July, rest then becomes the thunderstorms of summer. The atmospheric tears running from the sky clear my own and the bellows of thunder teach me to narrate my own story. And so, Inevitably, when tomorrow returns and the humidity slows me to the speed of molasses I will recall the baptismal storms releasing trouble from lasting, always.
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cover image: ‘lavadeira’ heitor dos prazeres