hermit crabs
I want to take a big bag, start moving around the house, tossing things into it. Anything that no longer serves. I’m doing it with my eyes…
I want to take a big bag, start moving around the house, tossing things into it. Anything that no longer serves. I’m doing it with my eyes right now. To pare down to nothing.
For a while there, I was saving everything. Every empty cereal box, I broke down flat and packed away, stacked on a high shelf for a future project. Small pieces of aluminum foil are squirreled behind plastic quart containers still. Any piece of greenery that could be saved, was. Today I crunched up a bunch of dusty eucalyptus, washed out the vase they had been standing in.
As things around us begin to open up I feel a magnetic pull back into the center of my world, this small apartment, unsure of what open means, what up means. What about job? What is job? What is subway? Where is subway to job? Can anything be screen-free? How long til we are screen-free? I have softened inside this place, I’m not ready for the outside. It feels so much like postpartum.
I used to have hermit crabs. I loved them. It’s tricky to know when one is molting, or if it’s dead, so you’re not supposed to disturb it if you see it’s little body half out of its shell.
We take our softness outside, cover it up. Our masks are actual masks that make it harder to talk, harder to recognize people you know well. Every move is hesitation, or I can’t understand you from behind another mask. My outside voice is out of practice, quiet and unsteady. My communication has become this, what you’re reading now — my art, my hope, my purpose. I’m not sure what else to do with myself. I like having only one thing. Maybe I’m not such a Gemini after all. It’s just that I like this one thing. Maybe I only want to do this one thing.
I’ll leave it there for now, for dreaming. No sudden moves.