Imaginary Journal

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You can’t give of what you have if you don’t know what you’ve got.

I want our eyes going black to be some kind of religion. I want us to have one holy day every week when we say I am not meeting your needs today. Instead, I am building a sculpture out of the bones from yesterday’s chicken. (Or whatever crazy thing feeds your heart.) On that day, we will tend the wounded birds in our hands or the storms in our minds. If our boundaries have been so blurred by our training that we can’t quite see our wounded birds or storms yet, then we’ll use that day to let the absence of other people’s needs help us to figure that out, because we have to strip the walls away, the ones that keep us in line, the walls that keep us from each other.

If I see a real and meaty you, I am better able to recognize the real and meaty me, and then someone else sees that in me and so in turn in themselves, and on it goes. We don’t have to devote our lives to appeals for the most minimal levels of social power and acceptance. We can become real and inconvenient and complicated and sometimes ugly and memorable and loveable and honest and bright. We can become known.

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• 3 months ago