“Everything is only connected by and and and.”
— Elizabeth Bishop
And my parents never told me how much of life
would be utterly boring. That the reason we fold
our clothes and put them away is so that we can
control something. No one explained the why of
the thing, why it was better to pull weeds out by
the root than cut them down. I just thought that
these were the ridiculous parts of being alive that
no one was brave enough to stop doing. I thought
about this while I picked lint from my girlfriend’s
socks because she doesn’t like how it feels between
her toes. I thought about my mother folding towels
like she learned working in retail. Once long ways,
once horizontally, then one more time in half. Or of
my dad who made me pull cotton seeds from their
white webbing. How he would spend hours pulling
it into soft pillows only to spin it thin into yarn,
strung all around our house like a spider’s web. My
patience is thin like ice in spring. I never learned
how to chew my food well before swallowing or why
I should stand up straight. My life was never supposed
to go on this long. I marked long days on a calendar
counting up to 25. Because I couldn’t imagine wanting
it to go on any longer. I wanted to burn out like
a supernova, my story splashed across the dark, like
a warning sign. A lightning strike, where fever rushes
through my veins. My body bloated and my head shorn,
both sunk into lukewarm water. Why not sprint to the finish
line, leaving my clothes strewn across the floor?
Is it not better than this? This tedium? This monotony?
I feel a sense of foreboding. Because this is all there is, this
and sparks of light where everything is teeming. I made it
to the edge of exploding but pulled myself back in. I looked
out over my own cliffside and tested with my toes, but didn’t
jump. All that urge, with nowhere to go. Today, I wake up to
coffee already made because I set it up the night before.