as above, so below
portal.
Try as I might, I’m no astrologer. At best, I can architect an unsound explanation for how I might feel. About why you might be feeling the way you feel. My best guess is not what this ancient wisdom intended but an intuitive relationship to a theory. A wisdom. A science. Like poetry. We’re always in the middle. Never at the beginning. There is no end. We are different stories intertwined. Different parts shift over and over like tectonic plates. The seismograph measures the distance between lessons. I feel all of this while I watch Luna sleep beside me. I listen to Rafi sleeping in the next bed over. A few days ago, we soar thirty thousand feet above the ground. We are at once weightless and heavy metal. Above the land. Above oceans. A storm. And another. Above life. With life. Within. Without. As above, so below. Moving faster than it feels. It doesn’t feel fast. It’s been eight months since we left one life for another. There’s a lookout. The vista. From thirty thousand feet, I can see we’re somewhere new. But I don’t know where. Before I saw the lava. Before an orthopedist told me my patella is old. Before. Before. Before. All those past lives. The illusion and the certainty. I kept driving down a one-way street the wrong way. I made a habit of it for about a week. After the call from the nephrologist, the one that we thought was routine. The one where his voice hung at the bottom of the line. First, he said bad news. Then he said disease. Then blood. Then cancer. Then, I left to pick up the girls at camp. And just like that, I wasn’t me anymore. Like an astronaut, I drifted above the ground. Untethered. No gravity. My feet hovering, toes searching for ground. Unable to touch down. In the absence of directional pull, it seems no rules apply. Our walk across the bridge between worlds begins. It would be a few more months until I realize — but really understand — that we four walk this bridge together. We also walk this bridge alone. Something happens before you get a diagnosis, but after you know one is coming. Like a movie, I can watch it. A woman in search of a place that no longer exists. Magical thinking wallpapers the entire world. I see it now like moving from one home into another but in the middle of a renovation. You don’t know exactly what your life will be like. Everything, including you, is under construction. The demolition surrounds you. Broken parts everywhere. I file scenes away for later because they are still sinking into my skin - not a part of me with which I am familiar. Like an arm. A leg. My hair. But when the diagnosis arrives, it is not grounding. Rather, it’s scorched earth. At thirty thousand feet, this is my interpretation. I capture experiences like snapshots. I hold them gently like I might a butterfly. We land in Florida with my mom. We are here to visit my grandmother. She turns one hundred and three the same day the moon covers the sun. The same day dark covers the light. How the covering is an uncovering. We walk the bridge of four generations. Together. A part. Apart. You can drive your car on the beach here, which makes no sense. Look both ways before you cross the beach, girls. I walk along the shore, and the water is so different from our home coast. A storm is coming, but for now the small waves ripple in and out like a giant lake. Celestial bodies reach the sand, and I throw my arms up to touch the sky. I used to want to scream my husband has cancer into the grocery store. The pool. The sidewalk. Computer. Anywhere into the world around me. Wherever I was. But something changed. Where I was a woman hovering above a life. I am now a woman simply living it. I don’t know when it happened. Why. I know Fonz exercises every day now. He lives. I know this much. I know this about me, too. I know we approach a gateway, and there’s still no telling what lies beyond it. I know there was a cat on the plane. We hear it meow, and then we see it saunter up the aisle. I know there is an entire high school sophomore class on their way to DC. I know my daughters sit next to me. I know that there was a song I listened to often in the before before. The words are not in my language. But because I am in the business of feeling it all, I understand. But when that lovely song became a graveyard, I let each word become a memorial to a woman I was no longer. A life in which I am no longer fluent. There are new songs now. The ones so loud they may be the engine pushing my car to the top of the hill. A new frontier forms beyond the horizon. Still shaping life. While we tip ourselves in a new direction, the sun rises from the edgeless ocean and sets somewhere behind a river. We keep shifting and shaping ourselves while each wave, large or small, passes over us. We are here. We have been somewhere. We are going anywhere.
Thank you for being here. XO
Written on Ohlone and Muwekma land of the Cofederated Villages of Lisjan.
Copyright (C) 2024 Ali Lawrence | Writer & Editor. All rights reserved.