12.16.25

what makes sense

Don’t try to make sense today. This wild seesawing in your heart, this motion
you make with your hands beseeching the clouds, trying to wipe every brow
of disquietude—you’ll never right the ship. There’s no tilting the earth back now.
Soon, you’ll return to your lists. You’ll wrap the holiday presents
with a roll of new tape, make ambitious plans to meet up in the haze
of engagements. There’ll be a doctor’s appointment on the calendar, some
deadline. The furnace will need tuning up, your car due for an oil change.
But while you are here, clawing for answers, shoulders curved as if
readying themselves for a lift the size of Atlas’s burden, know this:
Your ache is the mortar binding you to each living thing, your maddening
smallness its own atomic repair. Witness the fact of what’s erupted out of you
as the ruptures multiply and deepen: fresh tenderness like a lava rivering down
your arms, blistering everything in its path. How, in the middle of the cereal aisle,
contemplating oats over flakes, someone will attempt to bypass your cart
and fail, and you won’t think twice about leaping toward them, unprompted,
with apologies. It doesn’t matter the collision wasn’t your fault. In that moment,
you’ll know blame is useless, and the curtain will rise on a stage
where two people talk to each other with kindness and without urgency,
as if they have all the time in the world to crash into each other
again and again and again.


© Maya Stein

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