the Divine Ms. L...

Our efforts are recorded in the rich layering of memory. An idea that experience is not a single point. Present has many pieces including bits of the past, the future…dreams. And as the layers are added, I notice which are opaque and which are more transparent. Where do I get pulled that I didn’t expect to go? What is so strong that I lose sight of everything? If I engage the intricacies, I am in a new world that I couldn’t anticipate. Not an overwhelming awareness of everything I’ve ever known. Rather, a magic random draw of that which I never thought would go with this but since they are sitting here together…let me just take it all in.

I remember: she was wearing a green shirt or a yellow shirt. It’s strange I don’t remember. There was a dinner conversation about the difference between “pushing” and “yielding”. I’m in a dorm hall doing contact with psychology students. We’ve been practicing listening skills all day; it is interesting to know these things through touch. We are light, we hold our own, and we like direct mirrors: a forearm is met by a forearm, a hand is met by a hand. Beneath this dance, I feel another dance. My partner becomes someone else though this partner is still here. You and I---our last dance---we had stopped talking and finally could listen. You might not agree, but---three years in---I think this is our first conversation. That story, I never wrote that story, though I guess I’m writing it now. How we took the key rings apart and you took off your tall shoes for one walk around the block. I remember another dance somewhere else, and then another. I remember the texture of a stranger floor: dirt beneath plastic. I am there and also here typing and I am in the dorm hall leaning against all these shoulders melting together. Maybe we were each other’s bowl of frosting, each other’s favorite poison. Someone who would push back hard. And---sifting through layers of present tense---really I am just here typing at a beach house. Stacy is on the phone. I remember the way you like to fall asleep at parties. My psychology dance partner and I: now we are wiggling our fingers.

So…evidence? Maybe this paper is about abundance and being in many places at once. Maybe it is about loss: things only existing when we think of them and the passing nature of everything. Maybe we could try to nail something down: write it out, diagram, choreograph. But I think reality is a little more fleeting. Proven by nothing and nothing proven except what is right here right now. All that we have that we want to hold on to: it’s never going to be all here at once. However---memory, life. inspiration---it floods us…in ways we can’t understand. Our consciousness is the evidence and we become the historians---of the past, the present, the future---in as much as we can let ourselves feel.