Keep Going

Last week (I know, two posts in one month, look at me overachieving like an overachiever!) I posted about the general emotional state of where I was at, but for some of you (cough cough Bath cough) that's just not good enough, no, you want a laundry list of what I've been up to this summer.

And I was gonna post it too, in all its boring glory (it involves a lot of talking about how hollow books are actually a super pain in the ass to make and I don't recommend anyone ever in the entirety of their life deciding to create THIRTY OF THEM as centerpieces for a wedding, also if I ever see modgepodge or an Xacto knife again before I'm ninety years old it will be too soon) but then I realized that today is September 11th and while I'm not held hostage to the tragedy of it anymore and I do my best to ignore the way it's been politicized by both parties, it felt weird to be like, "Today is September 11th! Here is how my wedding is coming along!"

So instead, I'm posting a poem, and then I'm packing my boots and my swiss army knife and my sleeping bag and my sunblock and an obscene amount of marshmallows and my family into three cars and we are driving up to Yosemite. And everything will be restored and I will take deep breaths and surer steps and yes, I will avoid the Plague Mice and maybe when I come back it won't be 100 degrees in LA and THEN I will post about the boring laundry list of what I've been up to this summer.

Have a wonderful week, everyone.

milk inside | Sarah Wetzel

I wake, having lost track 
of the hours, a woman in the seat 
next to me weeping 
delicately, the thin 
blue current of her shoulders 
almost indistinguishable 
from the shudders of the plane. 
I’m not usually like this, she says, 
shifting eyes from mine 
to the window. I tell her, At times
we are all like this, turning 
to the book in my lap. 
What I want to tell her is
Stop. I’ve grown so impatient 
with misery. In the book, a man 
descends thirty-six thousand feet 
below sea level to stare 
at the deepest spot of the world. 
Through his tiny portal cracking 
under the enormous pressure 
of ocean, he says the snuff-colored 
ooze at the bottom resembles 
a big bowl of milk. We think 
we know misery 
yet can’t speak eloquently 
of even such a visible chasm. 
Inside this plane nothing happens. 
We are hundreds of miles
off course, our shape we recognize 
only by the shadow 
following. The woman stares out 
the window, waiting for something 
that won’t come. She rises 
then sits back down. 
What I mean to tell her is 
Keep going.