come one, come all

photosynthesis.

At the center of the dream, where I’m close to waking up, I can see all that has happened, and it has, but I’m not sure how to wind myself out of the maze. I listen to someone say, and I forget who, to find your way out of a labyrinth you must follow along a wall; just stay against a wall. One foot in front of the other. I’m not sure if I’m doing that in my waking life or not. I do move through my day stopping to wonder if what I am doing, I’m actually doing, or if my body has just shown up for it like a ghost. I lay on the floor a lot which is not at all like following a wall unless you’re sideways. Or things are upside down. Which I, and they, may be. I haven’t had a drink in almost five years. I read books about addiction or substance abuse disorders constantly. I especially love the ones where the memoirist goes to great lengths to stand naked before us readers and recount those dark and repeating days of need and longing and share the distance they go to satisfy both. Mine was quieter against the jackhammering of the stories I drank alongside. Letting the alcohol sit at the gateway, like a river into an ocean, of multiplying poor choices or no choices. There I abandoned myself time and time again. At least that’s, after a good fifteen books on the subject, what I’ve decided. There was always someone worse off, wilder, or dancing dangerously closer to a more deadly edge than me. I’m not sure if any of that is true, but somehow I was able to recover myself from the opening of a crevasse. To be sure, while some part of me lays at the bottom there, gone, I’m here, enjoying some version of sobriety. Particularly, when I wake up in the morning certain that whatever strange, awkward, or stupid thing I said or did the day before, I did under no other influence than my own humanness; I am profoundly grateful. In the last twelve hours, I’ve been approached twice on the state of Fonz’s cancer. Presumably, it is cured. This isn’t true. The truth would be that it is likely in remission, but there are upcoming tests to quantify the quality of that fact with science. Evidently, Luna shared with her class yesterday that her dad’s cancer is gone. One of her closest friends talked to me after school about this news and was happy to echo Luna’s relief. Luna’s teacher also shared her happiness with the news this morning at their lineup. I walk back to my car putting all the pieces together. Deciding that this is a version of the truth that I need not overcorrect for Luna today. Everything has a life of its own. Its own genius. Or purpose. On Sunday, Rafi joins the circus. She twist and turns, stretching her long body from the ceiling spinning on a Lyra, an apparatus shaped like a hollow moon. She learns how to do this in an afternoon. She beams. Like flowers blooming. Little gardens bursting from her eyes. Her face is full of shooting stars. In an email I receive after a night’s sleep, I read the story of the circus she will be a part of telling. It takes place in the unknown. My familiar shore. The terrain you can find between my toes and in my bones. Behind my eyes. The next day, while she’s at school, I’m in their room, and above her bunk, I look at the collage of pictures she has pinned to the wall. Luna is framed in a small Polaroid and adorned with a sparkling star sticker. She’s making a silly face, and the photo is taken an inch from her nose. This is their closeness already. Inches from each other. They share a planet. Rafi joined the circus. I repeat this to myself as though we aren’t already a family that organizes around a certain unpredictable and strange force. As though surreality is not the stage on which our lives play out. As though you can’t already see us better when you tilt your head sideways and dim the lights or listen for a song, letting it be familiar. Letting it be haunted. We walk the trapeze. Contort ourselves. Feel like freaks. This week, I spend more time than I feel comfortable indulging in my unraveling. My feelings. Their unveiling. Like ribbons, I am easily whipped around in the wind. Maybe my lying on the floor is where the bottom finally rises up to meet me. And maybe from there, I will stretch back out into the sun, dining like a king on daylight, balancing on the tightrope between worlds and hearts and knowns and the shadows trailing behind our orbits. Maybe this is where I make myself at home in the maze rather than trying to escape. Or where I lift off, tethered to the sky, waiting for gravity to return me to the ground.