some of the words
Tonight I sit in a room strewn with long strands of holographic tinsel. I should probably clean them up, but instead, I sit among it all…
Tonight I sit in a room strewn with long strands of holographic tinsel. I should probably clean them up, but instead, I sit among it all, listening to my family two small rooms over. I can hear the clinking of tiny ice cream bowls, the chatter of an after-dinner FaceTime, the afterglow of a good meal. We have everything in this place.
There is a way that this all feels like it’s going to be forever. I’m told that it’s not, but in a way, it is. Not forever in that we’ll be stuck inside our homes forever, but the way in which this particular experience will last. I can only glimpse what it might feel like to have life “re-opened” and to finally get the chance to marvel at my friends’ faces in their real-life, three-dimensional form. My arms will want to hold them. My eyes will be satisfied to drink them in.
It’s amazing how quickly we adjust. People everywhere have been adjusting to terror and fear and pain every day of their lives — some who have adjusted for a short time that felt like forever, and some that have had to adjust for years and years in ways that my heart will never ever be able to comprehend. Like a lot of folks, I have only experienced sorrow and loss in a personal way. The collective experience of hundreds and hundreds of my neighbors dying each day, while other people deny that this is even a real issue, plunges me into sorrow. We have to walk into that place at some point in our lives, and this time, we all have to walk there together.
One of my children just came into the room, the one that reads like a grown-up, bopped over to the computer and began to read the top of this post. She read the first paragraph and half of the second, then hugged me and proclaimed, “This is kind of poetic. Because you have a rhythm. And some of the words are artistic.”
I am trying to record this experience in a holographic way, beyond the three dimensions. It’s tough to do that from a single place, but I will continue to try.