[situated in the so-called simple-present tense, a daily memoir that disregards any sense of chronology]
The children make messes peacefully, whispering amongst themselves. I prop the baby against myself and become absorbed in a book.
My blog is a repugnant mirror that shows me some part of myself I don’t want to see and can’t comprehend. My revulsion for the previous post - and somehow myself - grows every time I log on. I sense this thing, this blog, this despised new media/ literary phenomenon that I’ve bought into for some obscure and ridiculous reason, has some important role to play.
I’m on the plane. The book I will finish in two weeks I can’t touch, because white-hot rusty switchblades are being pressed into my brainpan via my inner ear. My eyes feel like they’re squeeking. The lady next to me doesn’t speak English, I try to act like I don’t feel like I’m dying, but I feel like I’m dying so I’m not sure if I care. Just then the ocean returns to me, first pulling me, then pushing me, gently. The waves come one after another but they’re the same waves, like the leaves, year after year. They don’t force me, they filter through me, spreading the different “me”s over a palate, a spectrum. On the plane I can feel the ocean, it’s too big, too powerful; too many countless grains of sand flow in too many directions. I’m not seasick. There is a halo around my memory, from the sun setting beyond the rocks.
The sun is setting over the neighborhood where our church and my daughter’s soon-to-be preschool is located, and the air is cool for the first time in a week. The deep green of the trees imposes a sense of the deep south, though we’re in the midwest. My son slobbers on my shoulder while attempting to consume his hand, pausing to watch the birds or the electric lines, both a stark black against a constant blue. The moon is lucid and half-illumined, the August evening gives me a sense of space between myself and it, and the moon becomes a very real cosmic presence to me; I sense its enormity and the miracle of its suspension, but also that I might reach up and pluck it from my vision if I wanted.
The clock says 6:59. I've woken with a start for some reason. The house is quiet.
In the park my wife and children and friends’ children are playing and resting in the shade on a park bench. My daughter approaches me with a request to swing. The hour-long walk hasn’t seemed to wear me out so I agree to it. Before I know it, the whole gang wants to swing. So I help them out and then join them. I haven’t done it in ages, due to an instant nausea trigger, but today for some reason I’ve managed to sidestep it. I pump my legs, lean back and forth, and force myself into an upside-down pendulum arch. The children are impressed. I turn upside down to look behind me, like when I was one of them, and I see the basketball court, its players walking on it like a ceiling, jumping but never falling, the trees and shrubs growing and shrinking, undulating like the ocean.
Walking with my son in the August evening a hymn to the Holy Spirit comes to mind, so I sing it:
You are most blessed, Oh Christ our God. For when you had made the fishermen most wise by sending down upon them the Holy Spirit, by them you drew the whole world into your net - lover of humankind glory to you.
My son cries.
I walk up the hill towards campus for the first time in awhile. That subtle sense of autumn approaching underlines everything, like a general, sustained prelude to a flashback or deja vu. Many of the houses will have different people living in them, since I began walking this way on a regular basis almost two years ago. I imagine passing glances out the window at me as I trudge up the hill, in sunshine, snow, rain, and that massive space in between all of those things.
The coffee carafe knocks against the sink and the unwashed dishes, the coffee pot itself, and the counter at regular intervals, the way it does every morning.
