There is dying, for example, which I have never done, and presumably will only do once. I wonder if it will feel familiar, like falling asleep, like my dreams of falling off a high place, like fear or surprise.
There’s being in a place and thinking, I will never come here again. There’s being in a place again unexpectedly and saying, remember when we were here last time?
There’s my birthday, or your birthday, which we celebrate differently. A birthday feels particularly present tense, even in its here-we-are-again. A celebration of another nowness. I don’t feel I’ve accomplished anything on my birthday, but sometimes I look back at the procession of birthdays as though they are a parade, or a precious collection. Thirty-one opportunities to say, here I am.
In my childhood home in San Francisco there was a green tinted skylight on the ceiling above the entryway, and a burn in the white linoleum kitchen floor from one time that I dropped the iron. I will probably never go back there, but I dream about it sometimes, making circles in my mind, returning home.
There are smaller circles: every morning I make coffee. Every few days I water the plants in my house. I talk to my mom on the phone. I drink water, I write a check to my landlords, I walk the same way to the grocery store (down hirsch and up washtenaw, back way through the parking lot). On Sundays we make a special meal, except when we’re busy on Sunday, and then we do it on a different day. I check my email. (Is that a circle?) Is brushing my teeth a circle?
When I was young my favorite thing about halloween was organizing my candy into like piles: three snickers bars, seven tootsie rolls, two packets of skittles.
I stretch the circles out; like untangling my hair. I put their components into like piles; collections of varying size and preciousness. I make coffee twenty thousand times in a row, have thirty-one birthdays, kiss you seven thousand times.
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