Solace to walk into a familiar shop and hear the familiar clerk reply uncertainly when I
ask after her mental well-being;
“I’m not sure,” she says, “I could lose it at any moment.”
‘Solace,’ because his means that it isn’t just me.
Shortly afterwards, I hear a radio DJ suggest that we all
‘be kind to each other because these are strange times,’
so I suppose I’m not crazy, despite how I feel, which is full-on crazy.
It would be a relief to get diagnosed and be done with it;
“You’re crazy! Here are some bananas. Stay to the corners when you’re out running
errands,”
but I feel that in this odd zeitgeist, it is those who aren’t feeling anxious, who don’t
experience their gut dropping on occasion who might be worthy candidates for an
assessment from the DSM:
“We’d like to have a look at your brain please.
Leave it with us.
We’ll call you when we’re done with it.
Here’s a pack of Twizzlers in the meantime.”
It seems foolish to have thought that it might have been enough to scrabble through
ancestral darkness, or to heal from evolutionary hiccups within the integration of my
shadow–my efforts towards individuation. There is my heart thumping in my chest at 58
beats per minute. More to do, apparently.
Thump.
Thump…
…keeps beating.
Damn it.
More to do:
Show up, at least. Get yourself out of your hut and go to the market and speak words.
Bend down, then crouch beside the mystic, the balled-up woman balancing on the curb
who is answering the voices she hears pinging up through the sewer grate. Ask her what
she knows.
Ask her about the likelihoods.
Make sure you sit yourself beside her so you’re not out in the street, you know, like an
idiot. If she gives you permission you can holler through the sewer grate yourself and
then you’ll be a part of the conversation. Oh we know the physical shifts needed to save
Earth. It’s the fragile psyche, now chipped and peeling that’s the project. The peeling, the
chipping inflicted by the lack of action on the ground to mitigate the burning of the
planet.
“You do something.”
“No, YOU do something.”
“You first.”
“No YOU first.”
I’m going to the gym to push the sled, otherwise my teeth will break from my gritting of
them.
Push the sled up and back.
Up and back.
Up and back.
Up and back.
I am one banana away from psychic annihilation.
I have chipped a mind-tooth. Soon, I will be able to mind-eat only bananas and nothing
durable, nothing with healthy proteins in it,
or chunks of grief.
No Mackintosh Nostalgia Toffee, but even without my teeth,
I can still show up and put my real arms around you, all of you.
I love you so much.
The mystic loves you too.
Ping.