want, should or must?
There is another town in the town. Another city in the city. How can I explain this to you? Maybe I can't. The buildings we've walked by for years are solid in form, matter. Seems like they're not going anywhere, but everything is moving and changing at all times. Nothing as solid as it appears. A house could be set on fire, for example, or the earth could move beneath our feet in sudden, surprising ways that transform the whole landscape. Not trying to scare anybody, but it could happen. Buildings are demolished, whole blocks suddenly disappear.
Just the other day I walked by the check cashing place and not one, but three storefronts in a row were papered over, soon they'll be replaced. After that I won't even be able to remember what used to be there anymore. What's true for gas stations and donut shops is also true for larger co-ops, apartment complexes, countries and governments. This can happen anywhere from business districts to residential areas. I've heard that whole civilizations have disappeared suddenly, sunken below the water or buried in ice— hidden continents reabsorbed into the core of the earth.
No one ever dies either. I mean we die, of course we die, but the matter of us, the energy of us is never destroyed, just shifted around, repurposed. Free floating trauma gets picked up and carried down generational lines. Exploding hearts, mysterious blood clots. One ancestor froze to death and the next is overcome with invisible coldness, cold to the touch at the base of the spine as well as at the extremities. Nothing can warm them and there is no explaining it. No one can say why for sure and there's no one to ask for help, the dead quickly forgotten. Children don't remember the old aunts and uncles, never even met the great greats and when the family breaks into factions, moves away to follow different belief systems or money, rifts deepen and remain unmended.
We float downriver, oblivious to the lives of our kin and the ways we're interconnected. It doesn't matter if we know we are connected or not, it really doesn't. People live and die whole lives, reincarnate to live and die again imagining themselves completely alone every time. Misunderstood, judged, punished, outcast, harmed in terrible ways, always separate. No one sees me, no one really understands. How could they? They don't know what it's like for me, no one could ever. I hear it all the time. I used to feel it all the time. I don't know what to tell you, can't tell you nothing.
Except about the different places I've seen. The way the cities changed before our eyes, the countries, the landscape, even the bodies we inhabited. So strong and flexible once, grown brittle, fragile and requiring so much patience and care. One false move could end the whole story– wet marble stairs, a traffic accident, active shooter, eating mistaken berries from the woods turning out to be poison– anything, everything that happens every day, everywhere, is just keeping us on our toes I guess. Death is always close at hand, only ever an arm's length away. I don't say that to scare anybody, just to sober up the thinking, be clear about our terms of engagement here. We never have enough time. Never. Everything disappearing before the eyes.
Like the city or country I was in. The street scenes shifting, kaleidoscopic every time. Like the trees changing their colors in the fall, the seeming death of winter: bare sticks and frozen ground, followed by celebratory bursts of color in the spring. Red and pink azaleas blooming near where the trees shifted into oranges and yellows in the fall. So dramatic that people would take their devices out to take pictures. Unbelievable beauty is what we get here, heart wrenching pain and sorrow, limitless grief and also ecstasy. All of this and more.
And we're here keeping schedules? Setting up appointments and three hour meetings? I'm going to need to get some water to drink, move around to make the body more comfortable. Can we pause for a moment while I go to the bathroom? You don't need to wait for me. Do I even have to be at all these meetings? Want, should or must? What's the level of importance here? These are internal questions. No one's paying me to show up to these things and if they don't relate to my own health or happiness but cost me money, time or energy, deplete me in some other way, I'm not doing it. I'm just not. I'll see you when I see you.