What comes after

I’ll walk around the water and kick the crumbling earth. The sky would be pale, and there would be a certain chill in the air, and I’d wish that I owned gloves because my fingers would feel frozen in place.

I bargain with myself regularly, weighing necessity. I won’t buy gloves in January because I know that I will only have a few months left with them until spring, and by the time fall arrives, I no longer remember what it felt like to need them so I will forgo them until the thought finally occurs to me there at the beginning of the year. Time moves quickly for me, and it’s easy for me to delay things by inaction, knowing that I’ll wake and it’ll be three months from now, and I’ll have forgotten this impetus for change in my life.

Anyway, when I walk around the lake, I have nothing to do but think about this. I’ll be in my own company, and I’ll be there getting away from something. Getting away from nothing, really. The stillness in the air, the silence and its significance. Somehow, if I move further into nothing, it metabolizes. I’ll hear the gravel crunching under my tires and the swishing of high grass. I’ll listen to the finch sing, sit in the drizzle, and remember that what swallows me isn’t the immense thing I’ve made it out to be.

If you don’t keep on with what you care most about, you will instead carry the things you don’t. So, love given is never the thing I regret. And because my love is not finite, it cannot be wasted by me.

Once again, by a body of water, I’ll realize I survived the event. In the end, I’ll have learned that the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. Every day, more will be forgotten, and the intensity will burn out, and I’ll feel okay sitting with the uncertainty of what that was and who it all belonged to.

There are times when I’ve thought I’d write of the same thing forever, and if you wanted to know, it’s true that I mostly have.

It won’t be mine to write about anymore, and the thing is, I will come to the quiet agreement that I won’t want to anyway. They say it happens when you least expect it. And for us, the story closed, and I claimed I didn’t expect the ending, but frankly, we might have only been waiting for it. When you believe something is forever, you can write about it without its change. You can imagine the pending good and soften what has been cruel— anything to keep it breathing, immortalized, and at the very least, known.

And I often say that I’ll be old, by a body of water crashing into a rocky shore, and my hair would be silver and hang to the middle of my back, and still with a pen in my hand, I’d be spelling it out.

But I’ve run out of ways to put this. And I don’t think I know it like I thought I did, and I don’t write fiction, really.

If you can believe it, I watched Pride and Prejudice for the first time—in theaters for its 20th anniversary.

It impacted me just as you suspect. I didn’t stop thinking about it for two weeks straight, and I think of it every time the winding roads on my drive to work are thick with fog. I don’t have much else to say about it, just that, of course, I loved it, and of course, I was suspicious of whether or not his love for her was true, and then was, of course, proven wrong by the long game of care he sewed throughout her life.

The movie was remarkably beautiful, and at first, Mr. Darcy was not really, but by the end, I loved him despite my initial impression.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. How could you not?

I love the quickness of Dorothea Grossman, she is a Los Angeles poet, known for her conciseness and her quirkiness. As someone who writes a lot of prose, I am really drawn to her short works. This one above, not all but six lines, and entirely the thing I wish to express. Entirely the thing I wish I’d first said.

I am always talking about forgetting things, and it’s sad at times, but sometimes, like now, it can be a lucky thing. I am not bitter about the ending of things in my life, maybe mournful, but even so, I am usually receptive to what it means for something to be over. It isn’t that I forget, but maybe that the preserver within me allows my forgetting. I sit in front of the thing I love and I spend the seconds I have there trying to remember what everything looked like. I am scanning, and I am hardly aware of it, but I’m running my thumb over what I want to remember and repeating to myself that I will. I laugh about how easily I can forget, and the convenience of this, but the truth is, sometimes, the sun strikes me like a gong, and I remember everything, even your ears.

If you’re itching to read some proper poetry this month, my paid newsletter will arrive in two weeks. If you aren’t looking to read some proper poetry this month, that’s okay too. You might accidentally run into some over on my Instagram, @sky.daye where I share, connect, and create.

Thanks for reading with me. If something here spoke to you, you can write it down, or stitch it on a sweater, or screenshot it, share it, and tag @sky.daye

Warmly,

Sky