How We Do It: Part LVI

Somewhere along the I-5 in parched California

This morning I lay in my bed in the darkness with halfway thoughts. The light came only halfway into the room through the lowered slats of the blinds. If I live to be 85 years old, I'm only halfway. As children we are as unaware of the halfway as we are, at the halfway, of the end. Thresholds are always that. Liminals. I heard a breath, a halfway cry, a grunt. I slipped my robe on and walked to Sophie's room. She was lying on the floor, face-down, her arms in a fencing pose, quietly seizing. I turned her over, wiped the drool from the side of her face, the tendrils of wet hair and picked her up, lay her on the bed. Sophie has a seizure every morning, and I imagine it happens in the halfway when the light and the tides and the moon and the shifts of the earth on its axis conspire to affect the most exquisite, the tendrils of nerves, reaching for all of it.  She is halfway off the drugs she was on one year ago. She will be okay.



it launched forth, filament, filament, filament 
by itself

Walt Whitman