Crud Meridian

The good days – not the great days, the exceptional days – have a quality like a spun top, a toy car. Something that has stored up energy and exhausted it. By the middle of the evening everything north of my shoulders has quieted somewhat and rearranged itself into something coherent and calm and two dimensional. I can observe all the angles of it, I can pick it up and look underneath, I know the beginning and the end. It’s not happiness – it’s colder- but it’s manageable. It’s a beginning, a very good place to start. If I concentrate I can sometimes get there by midday, but that requires a great deal of silence and peace and commitment to the bit. It does not tolerate interruption or plans or activity. It feels like being pre-death. I get to bask in being and doing exactly nothing, and looking only backwards with some real perspective. Actually, as I get to this sentence it seems like not a very good place to start. I struggle to hold onto this feeling. It is so fragile – too loud a noise, too bright a light, and the whole thing sort of shatters again, springs into too many shapes of too many sizes and I have to live inside one and hop to the other and try to remember how I got from A to B and what was that shaped like and how might that work? During the day it is like trying to estimate the exact layout of a house without leaving it. You might find that to be a tedious but not impenetrable task, given a measuring tape and some time. I would agree with you, had I not failed to add that the experience is generally undertaken immediately after waking from dental surgery and being chased by a wolf that is also your sex-ed teacher. But at the end of the day I can outrun the wolf. The wolf rarely catches me. And then I can find a door, I can survey the grounds, I can wander the perimeter and try to figure out what room goes where. I can peer into windows, note where the roof slants in on the upper levels. There’s the dining room, there the foyer, there’s where I fought and then made love to the wolf. Add that to the blueprint. 

But the real disappointment is in the setting sun. A day of chase, and then suddenly in the evening I am free for a few minutes, an hour, to see things as they really are. Then the sun sets and I have to go back inside the house. I’ve never been outside the house long enough to leave the grounds, to follow the sound of ocean to any shore. It gets cold, I have to return to shelter. And I don’t hear the wolf – the wolf is sleeping too. But it wakes up before I do. I hear it when my eyes open. I hear the click of it padding through the halls. I hear the already-exhausted sound of its breathing, like it’s killed something already. I smell it. It knows where I am and it will find me when I get out of bed.