Hold, n.1
The action or fact of holding.
I often think about the softness of a wrist, where the hand meets the forearm. How it can twist so miraculously without a puckering of skin. Rebecca’s wrist is tanned, and strong from gripping the neck of her bass. This bass has strings worn smooth by use and wood that slides easily under the calluses on our thumbs. I prefer playing hers to playing mine; it feels lived in and comfortable, powerful in all its years. I have never put in the time to wear my own coarse steel spirals down to this state. Reb’s wrist has a single flower on it, pink with black ink line work, a tattoo she’s had for years. Plumeria. I can picture it: her arm, tensed with muscle and music, better than I can picture my own. My gaze is outward these days. Aside from that which falls on my face– it's hard to avoid one’s own gaze in the mirror.
The action or an act of keeping in hand, or grasping by some physical means. Also, an opportunity of holding, sometimes almost concrete, something to hold by.
I write about a walk I felt I had to take. I write about walks, and clouds, the way light looks on far distances, and how nowhere near my pink house seems to be high enough to get a satisfactory view. How I want to hold the glowing tip of Baker in my humming belly... keep it in sight for as long as possible so that maybe I can carry it with me. I write about how valleys can hold light in their pockets and how a win- dow across Lake Union can hold the sun, in evening hours when its rays are almost horizontal to the surface of Seattle. How the sun can sit (held) in that window and I wonder if those people (that house’s people) know how lucky they are. These things present themselves to me vividly when I go to write about myself. A contradiction. Lately, it’s hard to find all that’s in this body when I try. I work to convince myself that I am reflective, I am porous, I hold light in the marrow of each bone.
Figurative. A grasp which is not physical.
1608 W. Shakespeare King Lear vii. 238: Let goe thy hold.
Years ago as I sit in my bedroom, my dad’s voice floats under my closed door from the dining room. He tells my cousin that he has no memories from before his father’s death. The first seven years of his life. He says this in a tone too light for the weight of this thing, this truth he carries with him. I hold this fact about my father in my belly all the time. Awful in its incomprehensibility.
Today I am so sleepy; my brain moves like a spoon swirling cream into earl grey, careful not to clink against the edges of a fine white porcelain.
Contention, struggle, pulling opposite ways; opposition, resistance.
I remember sitting on the windowsill of my van, the spaceship, with my torso and head outside the car and my feet on the driver’s seat. Rain all over me.
Driving to Taylor Bay with Alison, contorting grandpa’s mattress into the back of the spaceship for my first apartment. On that after- noon on the peninsula Alison and I strip off our clothes behind the spaceship and run into the Sound. I plunge into the water headfirst, so cold that it hurts, sharp against the scrunch of my eyelids. I can feel every beating, prickling part of myself, every limb; I can feel my brain pressing into my cranium, stretching at the skin of my scalp. At the same time, I dissolve into bright white, brain in a jar. Water erases. Doesn’t erase. Takes me out of my body. Puts me back in. Water as contradiction. I miss that beginning of June floating. How fresh my face felt with hair pulled all the way back in my green bandana. Sun and sweat and wearing my blue and white striped dress and nothing else, no nothing underneath.
To catch or hold one's breath: to check suddenly or suspend the act of respiration.
I used to think, way back, that when you breathed in your body sucked in, got smaller, and a breath out pouched your belly out in a curve. It wasn’t until a few years ago that I really thought conscious- ly about breath, breathing, and learned that it was the opposite. It makes sense now that I think on it. That a deep breath expands your belly, chest, inflated lungs, because that’s what a deep breath feels like: being all full up. So I take big sips of wind. Hold my breath in, once in a while, to sit in fullness, bigness, take up a bit more space.