words for silence

tug of war.

Today, I wonder what in the world I could possibly write about this world, but I find that this is precisely what it is I must do to push and pull something through my veins. Maybe this is what happens deep in the core of the Earth with tectonic plates when things begin to shift; there is an interruption first. A booming sound. A silence. A great disruption that sends a roar into the dirt. Ignites a flame and then the reason for a change. The kind of change that shapes lands. Moves bodies of water. Makes something tidal that just moments before laid dormant. I'm not sure. I decide to sit with my thoughts to let them run away with whirring anxieties and sadnesses. I decide I must learn more about what would be helpful besides my sadness, which I am aware does nothing but make me human. But also, humanity is my currency. Maybe today is just for praying or for laying on the ground. How each grief rises from the dead to welcome its new member. This is also what grief can be, so I let it wash into all the corners like a wave and fill up every space. I've been sitting in my office for an hour; no one else is awake yet, and it's still very dark. I open things up like a can and pour the contents of dailyness onto the page. It's almost as if I am retraining my hand to connect to my mind but pulling from my heart while the skies funnel through my fingers like tiny tunnels. Channels. There isn't a particular center here, which likely has something to do with the election. Why would I bother to wrangle chaos into a neat shape? Maybe because this is what it is to be of and in this world. I keep using the word "culturally" to capture the force behind collective behaviors - ones that feel out of alignment with my own. The word shapeshifts into letters strung together that barely have any meaning left at all. The name for this phenomenon in language is semantic satiation. But I want a word to hold all the things that make no sense, how moving at the speed of expectation is how we tune our instruments, set a clock, live our lives. I am complicit and also out of place. Both can be true. It was my turn to put the girls to sleep last night, and Luna and I lay in her bunk and read from a book that makes us laugh. There's a greediness in me that makes me feel like I can't get close enough to her. It's love. It's longing. She is both the baby of our family and of ancient wisdom. I keep thinking of the language Nüshu. A woman tells me a bit about it in the middle of the playground after school while we talk through time and space about grief and how disorienting it is against the backdrop of life as we know it here in the middle. The middle of life. The middle of the playground. The middle of a dark forest. The place I go when the ground can no longer hold the way forward. I am told my ovaries are in a hyper-vigilant state. I think to myself, so is the rest of my body, and somehow, all of this still feels like a secret language between women discovered after an eternity of speaking. Of being. How can this be? I read a prayer before I read the news - this is what my phone delivers as though it knows. I hate that it knows. But I suppose it's nice to feel like something does. This all continues to happen in the dark before anyone else in my house is awake. I cry along with the words - they seem to be crying, too. Before anything else happens I jot down the question, And if you find yourself feeling like a winner today, I wonder what you have won? This, of course, was written a week ago today, and it's taken me precisely that long to sit here on this page and push and pull something through my veins. But today, we tour a middle school for Rafi, and a whole new kind of grief comes to sit at the table. And it's both beautiful and brings me to my knees. In her way, I can see that parts of Rafi will leave, and others will arrive. I look around a room full of prospective parents. I know many of them. I imagine us gathered in ceremony, a rite of passage for us and our children. After I return Rafi to her elementary school, I walk in the redwoods with a friend, and we talk about staring into the warm light and rough waters of grief in its many forms. Oh, the portals we walk through without knowing who we will be on the other side. I am arriving closer to myself each day, but it doesn't happen without the death of other parts. Of so many other parts. Here lies a million sunsets made of day and night, all woven together into arresting beginnings and the fiercest farewells. Rest well, we’re going to need it.