Separation
Anxiety sneaks in on little rat wings, scuttles and flurries
of the what if’s as I approach
seven whole days without them. I imagine the earth quaking, riding a giant
wave across
housing developments, stucco and concrete, mini-malls where
packages of Japanese udon and
Vietnamese fish paste get tossed like detritus, fly into
hungry mouths. We all mix together,
the vatos on the corner, the women tending shop, the man in
the Mercedes, rolling and cresting over
that wide and shiny city, that gritty and deranged barrio, those
seasons that meld and mesh,
the sameness that is sunshine sprinkled with centuries of
drought and doughnut shops. Here, we are safe. The snow is bad
enough, the avalanche tears into our neighborhood and miracles abound.
That’s what I’m talking about. The pain of real seasons. The challenge of the day to day makes us
exempt from the wanderlust of the earth at her core, her
need to finally release because where I
come
from, where I’m going, no one is spared. Plates are pushing, pushing, waiting,
waiting, lean in,
hold on and it starts with windows, windows rattle, find a
doorway, find a table, cover your neck, no
your head, no your neck, always have a plan. Keep bottles of water in the trunk, keep an extra
blanket in the backseat. Call
your children often. Think of them with the snow and her soft thaw
and coats, downy and warm. The
way the pull their hats over their ears, their mismatched socks. The deer watch wide eyed in the yard as they pull away on their
bikes, shout, “Look at me!”
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