A universal schoolyard
I am the scuffed white ball at the end of the string. The faster I spin, an attempt to flee, to forget, smacked by hardened palms and youthful grunts, the faster I wrap myself around the pole lodged in the earth. I hit the weather worn metal with a hollow thud. I am suspended for a second kissing the gray, thankfully still… then I fall away, unravel myself from my destiny, wait for the next throw and punch.
I expect it. So far that is the only way I’ve known to stop the spinning, the constant motion circling that pseudo silence within every continuously acrobatic atom. I think that if enough beings push me I can attain my goal. Instead, what if I withdrew, stopped begging for the nudges and slams? What if I just lay still? A memory flits past fibers, remembering how stillness feels every so often between the back forth back.
I am (will be) still tethered (to the ocean, farming, my writing) but I am not tangled up in it, always trying to be simultaneously free and closer. I am not (will not be) twisted and pulled and smashed into the gray (of gloriously squally sunset-less evenings, no land in sight. Of the rocks and slug underbellies and spider eggs in gossamer sacs. Of black words and white paper fusing into one).
If I resign myself to stillness, to the quiet of disengagement, then I simply lay against my desires, my string straight and unstrained, my body able to re-inflate those bruised spots and enjoy the emanating warmth of earthly minerals nestled up next to me, whispering, “Isn’t this better?”
The kids will still want to play, prove their strength, I know this too.
But the intervals can shift, I can be less attractive to battle. Like the ships the Native Americans didn’t see, I will be out of context to tangles and strikes. I will melt into the gray with my scuff marks and dirt and age and the string won’t even be necessary anymore.
Naturally tethered, the struggle dissolved, the hard fists no where to be seen, felt, imagined.
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