The Right Thing

Sick at 3 a.m. with fever and a sore throat; the virus comes to mind. Vague symptoms leave room to roam. No one is awake with me so I tend to myself – my burning muscles and my new normal. Will Lex still study abroad in Spain? Will Beck be able go to the Robotics World Championships? Along with economic disease and death, this potential pandemic has uncovered more ugly truths. These thoughts fall through my sky like rain, passing through branches, rolling off the skin with a little seepage here and there. The idea of Love is becoming more and more abstract.

I'm less obsessed, beloved, more free. Yet even in the letting go, something strange and beautiful keeps pushing to the surface like broken pieces of glass climbing through the soil to find light. I fall through it so completely. I'm just being honest. There are decisions we make for those we love and for whom love us. Of course, they make those decisions for us as well. But then there is the swift motion of east and west bound lanes. There is Ashtabula and that park near the big lake. There are the borderless kinetics of heartbeats and the secret place one goes when they are caught up in birdsong at dawn. My body is so tired of running in the other direction. Maybe that's why I must always move in pain now.

I can't say the right thing and I can't do the right thing. I just know the right thing; I let it come and go. It floats by on a river and I long desperately to wade out to it; to pick it up in my freezing hands; to take it home next to the fireplace and hold it. Let me, Lord. Let me.

Moonlight patches glow through the branches of wintering trees like a quilt draped over the back of the neighborhood couch. I might be really sick but I'm not sure. Maybe I'll call the doctor in the morning. For now there is just me again, wrapped up in midnight's cloak, wondering when I will ever . . . just . . . sleep.