(I will weave my hurt into these yarns and my gratitude and joy)

Certainly I have reason to be perturbed. I am suckling a barren popsicle stick and he is making bear noises in the kitchen. He lifts his knees and holds his fingers up like claws.

Certainly there are infinite ways of becoming new. There is a bookstore with dramatic literary titles mashed with architectural concepts I will go. I will read until I am stuffed to overflowing with other people's lives. I will celebrate theirs as my own and feel the needles slithering through flesh. Ours is a bond made by the veins of our hands.

I have flipped the popsicle stick from my tongue to the futon beneath me. The likelihood is high that a gnat has just flown into my mouth. I am remaining calm.

I delight in the give of the keys beneath me, concavities cleaving to fingertips. I really should be brushing my teeth.

It is time,
she said,
to do nothing.

I breathe. God is golden clouds and I am easing back into them, hugged by wool and the faint smell of sheep. I hear bleating, see the wide green and the crags and the hooves, meandering toward grazing and streams.

I am called back by the plant and the book on the wooden apple crate propped beside the doorway. Though there is no door, though perhaps it is more realistically, resplendently, a way.

I have gotten off track. Skeins unwind as my fingertips grow red, needles arcing over and over again into flesh. I will weave my hurt into these yarns and my gratitude and joy. You will wear it round your neck for seasons. It is a token of the words I cannot say because they are not words anyone has yet said and still I believe it exists, somewhere: the way of saying it.

You're a genius all the time. Be sure of it. Find your family and hold their hands as the lightning strikes. Drenched in rainwater and fingernails charred, your shoulders brush, warming the place where you stand.

The movie made him cry and then I cried not because of the movie but because of the part in the movie which made him cry, which would have made me cry had I not been crying because he was crying at the part of the movie that would, otherwise, have made me cry.