But Oh How Close We Came

I busted up my hand trying to open a window that didn’t want to open. Apparently. Whatever I did really messed up my knuckles and now holding a pen is painful as is lifting my insanely oversized coffee mug because the damage done is to the right hand. The most precious, the most necessary. This matters little if at all to you, it would seem, except that now instead of scribbling trails of wandering thoughts in my notebook, as I normally would before I started typing up a blog post, I can only scribble by typing. Typing is less painful than writing with a pen or lifting coffee, though only slightly. I very much hope this doesn’t last more than a few days. The irony is that I was just telling my son the other day how I keep giving myself the stupidest injuries completely by accident. How does one destroy her knuckles by opening a window, it’s so dumb.

I came across a small quote by Clarice Lispector which goes like this, “It’s inside myself that I must create someone who understands.” I thought how true that is and how it’s a little bit sad. I feel that way and I am sure so many other creatives do, writers, poets, artists. We find fewer and fewer people around us who understand the depth of our feelings, the breadth of our souls. It is impossible, it seems, to find another soul who meets you where your soul is. Like satellites drifting by one another in the dark vastness of space.

Perhaps the whole truth though is that we don’t actually want anyone to get too close. To be able to undo ourselves we need our own space, our own time, our own universe. So we can breathe. Remember our own minds, our own consciousness. People are noise, people open their mouths and it’s all static and distraction from what we have going on inside of our own world.

The world around us is collapsing it seems. I read a blog post by a woman who said she isn’t surprised because in all honesty, how else could this go? And I get that. We have been too brutalized, too abused for too long to have this unravel any other way. The way we have been living with our anger and outrage in each others faces constantly, this kind of arrogance and simulated interactions instead of real flesh and blood ones, it breeds all kinds of human devastation. We have lost something we never quite had but oh how close we have come to goodness at times. It is that hope to get close to goodness once again that keeps our little hearts thumping into yet another day. Thinking we may just find it in ourselves to make it, maybe not to rise above but at least to carve a new and more beautiful way through, to find the kind of magic we’ve been looking for all along.

Meanwhile, my hand is not happy with me for typing so much and my brain is wishing I had a point to make which was clever and clear but I haven’t the slightest of either. I would love another cup of coffee but I don’t look forward to lifting it.