On owing

Luckily for me and my finances, the things I owe most often are emotions or words – not actual debt.

These are phrases I think most people say as a sort of appeasement, to demonstrate their shame for wronging someone else, or their eagerness to pay off a balance of kindness that’s long been running up.

But as often as people claim to owe each other apologies or explanations or favors, I think many times we say we owe each other to comfort ourselves instead of the people we say we owe.

I started thinking about all this recently after I neglected, as I too often do, to keep in touch with a friend and follow up on our plans to see each other.

When I said I was sorry for disappearing, he was nice enough not to point out just how often and for how long I had vanished. Instead, he asked: “Why are you apologizing? You don’t owe me anything.”

We did (at last) end up meeting, but what he said has since stuck with me.

No, I didn’t owe him anything at the time. But it’s because he didn’t insist I owed him that I finally paid off my debt.

The thick of it

When you’re there, in the thick of it, it’s not that there’s no motion–
just constraint.
It’s not that you’re broken–
just stalled.

You’re not frozen, just stationary.
Not inanimate, just still.

I was, too, if only for today. Head bent, nose buried, feet leaden…rutted.

But however badly you’re stuck, all you need is an inch. And tonight it was a Facebook note, by a Friend I barely knew.

She wrote that she doesn’t have much time. She said, “In short, I want to tell you all I love you.”

I’ve read it twice and still can’t make them fit, still don’t know which should contain which–

this lament or this gratitude.

To “err in the direction of kindness”

It’s been a couple months since I graduated college, but the imprint of that cap and the memory of that gown remain very present.

And I know his name has come up on these pages before, but when I came across George Saunders’ commencement speech at Syracuse University, I had to read it. Then I had to read it again.

His message to recent grads is simple:

Six eyes still watching furniture move

One head looks down;
a pony tail perks up:

Enough of all this
sighing.

Two mouths adorn teeth;
one fastens a giggle.

Three faces each
mask one reflection:

You’ll see the seasons.
Taste the snow.

Separate. Far away.

Two legs will leave. Three minds will have
one room to rearrange.

Serotonin

All you need is a tube
and your slim mint Spyder
will become a widow—
fat, black and
sated with you

white lilies to hold
in your backseat coffin,
your face more
shocked
than the bleached afternoon.

I pound

the glass of your condition–
a quarantine
self-imposed.

Until your limbs
wake you to drive

and leave your name
calling you.