Red Rot

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on turning 27

I talked to my mom on the phone tonight. She said that she worries I put on a good face and keep a stiff upper lip. She wanted me to know that I can come to them with hard things, that my cousins were asking after me. I teared up on the phone, but you couldn't hear it in my voice. Even in small moments I have some repressing urge to hold it together.

Sitting on the couch later I watched Grey's Anatomy for the first time. She stood looking through the windows at the babies, wondering how we got from there to here. That moment of birth before we've been damaged or neglected. And my eyes went bright again. I know I'm too sensitive.

I cried even before that. Standing on a trail this afternoon somewhere in the White Mountains. Letting yet another person in. And I thought about resiliency. This messy, hopeful life. Despair. Our messy, hopeful deaths. Lord, my knowing and unknowing. My heart, too big for feeling and still too small for Quinn. Walt Whitman with his own bleeding thoughts in the forest:

"And already a thousand singers, a thousand songs, clearer, louder and more sorrowful than yours, / A thousand warbling echoes have started to life within me, never to die."

12:31 a.m. - 2012-06-11

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