On Simplicity

Essay 44

I took off all my makeup after one abrupt night out, sat down on my carpet cross-legged, waiting. There are ways to calm one’s hot mind, some more helpful than others, I keep reeling for the clearest words and who is speaking. My friends converse more softly these days, I often feel like the loud one, the field-green and the young one, and at home there is a silence that is always new. A suspended state for one’s body to listen. A field of vision that spans acres—they yield to eyes that search for that dilating edge.

It’s when the masks are off that people can meet and talk. A clean lens scans who is trailing the space, who’s chosen to climb a time-shorn self’s slow landscapes, with primal shapes of hands and thoughts that become seen. A soundless pause in one’s shapeshifter’s disarray so that what is found can nearly always be the same.

There is stillness where the souls of similar sizes gather, a rolling together, a resting. Without verbs or flaws a sating joy to greet me, and all that belongs in the right place, a careful table I’ve set for all that’s beyond guest. In shabby sweats and post-pose where we’re real.