I only saw the moon last night because I turned my back and then turned back around. A pumpkin-colored disc floating just between the trees, close enough to touch except that I couldn't. I'd never have seen it if I hadn't turned.
Today I began the work of writing about Sophie's vaccination history. I push into the depths of the internet --pseudotumor cerebri and corticosteroids, pseudotumor cerebri and DT and polio vaccinations -- twenty years in, and it all comes back. How I didn't know a goddamn thing and neither did They. It's a chapter on control and there doesn't seem to be any way to, ironically, control the many arms of it. An octopus, eggplant purple, perverse, seductive, terrifying. The constant chirp of insect and throaty call of frog, the sunshine speckled pine tree outside my window, the raucous crow overhead, the solitude -- are they real? Is it opportunity to be so weakened by events outside of nature that you must find your strength in going back into it, or suicide to do so?
My friend A suggested that I take James Baldwin's advice about fear:
Turn and walk into it.
