Process

Waking up after disaster is to relive the blow to your gut. The short moment of lightness, of a day's potential, instantly smothered and suffocating. The news trickle in and nothing is good, I stare in apathy at the street below. Something automated in me begins to fold laundry, to repot plants. The physical act of doing something useful is a better anodyne than wailing, this is why there is never a shortage of food at funerals. Helplessness is a treason against our beings.

I rage at the Universe. Why would you leave me all these pennies if only to pull the rug out from under all those I love? Why should I be given gifts when people around me are pummeled by each breaking wave rushing to the shore? My imagined mountains look like mole hills in an instant. I wonder what deals I've been making and if I can draw up new terms. He says you owe them to live a good life, and I'm trying to remember what that is. My heart is a thousand pounds of love, it doesn't fit in my chest, it floods my edges and swells onto the sidewalk. How life makes us so little, just as it makes us so large. I bought armfuls of flowers yesterday, before I knew anything, they grow and beam everywhere I turn, and isn't that the thing?

Life can be so beautiful it's painful.
Life can be so painful it's beautiful.
Too.