In the middle of the night I wake thinking about desire paths, where people always make their own paths regardless of what the park designer had in mind. About how we can't stop from making things harder for ourselves, always pushing through the underbrush when there's a smoother path just steps away.

Sometimes I wake thinking about beavers, building a dam stick by stick, accepting that sometimes strength takes times. Building something to benefit not just the beavers but the fish and the birds and the future. I try breathing deeply, taking their advice, trying not to run ahead of myself and invent problems that aren't there. Trying to fill my cracks with mud and glitter and faith in the universe. 

Sometimes I wake with a hand on my hip and electricity running all along my bones.

In the middle of the night I wake because a cat is yelling for attention, wanting badly to purr and be noticed for it and then leave again.

In the middle of the night I wake sure that the shadow in the hall is a bear. Or an axe murderer. An axe murdering bear. No one would know that that was how I died, and if I didn't die no one would believe me.

Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I disappear entirely. It's only that these atoms have other things to do, other places to be, other hallways to haunt. I come back together by morning, mostly, or at least you wouldn't notice the new holes in me. They're lined with the same stars as the old ones. 

 Look I know a spiral is supposed to be a great and wonderful mathematical concept, a real sign of the order and the beauty of the universe, but it sure doesn't feel that way when you're in the middle of one. At the bottom of one. Wherever. Technically a tornado is also a spiral, after all. Logically I know that one of the great things about a spiral is that it has a beginning and an end, but when has logic ever been in charge here? This boat is being driven by three raccoons in a trench coat. 

After I'm gone, to outer space or visiting a deep sea hydrothermal vent or just past where the horizon bends away, you can consult your file. Five feet tall, it'll say, broke open like a geode every time you left and then regretted waiting. Clumsy but tried to be careful when it was most important. Your file by now is just full of Mary Oliver poems and a tattered faith in the wonder of the universe, cat videos and Christmas movies and tights with a hole in the toe. Really just wanted you to tell her she was magic. 

Are the creatures in the hydrothermal vents making palaces out of my bones? All of them whispering quietly, a little too serious for her own good. Had cotton candy threaded all along her nerves. Measured twice and immediately forgot. Sometimes a graveyard, sometimes a supernova. Just over the edge of the horizon, where the sun flashes green, spelled out in the last remaining rays, softly blue when held up to the right light. Thought you were funny. Was magic.

 Do you remember how in 2008 I decided to start a No Feelings plan, which was a joke even then because when have I ever been anything but raw nerves and poker face and hurricanes for hands? I think about it, sometimes, the optimism of deciding that I could just brute force myself into some new shape. The joke is that I'm still doing it, pretending with one hand that feelings are for suckers and with the other filling my tote bag full of them to review later. Always swiveling unpredictably between a good one and a bad one, always sure that they're both true at the same time.

It's hard to be in charge of all the weather, braiding lightning and sunshine and soft grey clouds together. I feel like what I've built should be visible from space but I'd be happy enough if you held all of this cupped close in your hands. I don't know the shape of what comes next, which of my moves will bring petrichor and which will bring disaster, but it's certain to be one of the two in the end. 

 Neurobiologically speaking, everything that has happened has coated our synapses with more knives than glitter, and the fact of a body is that it holds on to what scares us more than anything else. For safety. So it shouldn't be surprising that when confronted with a friendly genie holding a small jeweled frog all thirteen of the gnomes and the basket of kittens that run this show want to retreat to the woods to never be seen again. That's just science. Sure, maybe my bones are made of the kind of poems you want to read, but then maybe I'm five feet of dandelion fluff in girl form and all you're really going to do is scatter me to the winds. The only way not to lose is to avoid the risk entirely. 

And yet. 

And yet I think about the guy at Windsor Castle whose whole job is the clocks, who spends a full day each week winding each 300 year old clock and gently assuring that they haven't yet fallen out of time. I think about that Mindy Nettifee line "One look from you and my spine/reincarnates as kite string." I think about how we keep walking through fire in case there's something beautiful on the other side, and what if we are that something. Maybe my limbic system shouldn't be the one in charge. 

Maybe I should acknowledge that being scattered to the winds could be worse than doing nothing at all. 

 It is late at night and the crowd clears and I have had enough drinks and in a flash of rain soaked pavement and the cold kiss of the rain I remember. I remember this feeling. And suddenly I love everyone in this room. And man, that was always my favorite thing, the moment where everything came together and all the people I loved were in one room, dancing. But it turns out that feeling was a me thing and not an everyone else thing and I didn't know until now that this whole world lived in me. I thought it was you, bringing it here.

It has been months that this thought has been living on my phone and I have just been thinking about whether or not I do this still. Do I try to spin what is brown in me into something beautiful? I think about it all the time, you, and the ways we've always done this. Am I a more complete version of me when I'm trying to excavate whatever might be the most perfect thing I have to give?

The other day I was reading about the hairy frog, which is a frog that lives in Africa and, when it's scared, breaks its own bones to force them through its skin to make claws. And look, I'm not here to look a gift metaphor in the mouth. We've come through so much, given up so much, reformed ourselves through loss and death and death and loss. I'm still here, breaking my bones to make it through the days. We'll get through the next thing too.

 In the middle of the night I wake needing to know more about Napoleon's Russian campaign, worried about the losses we can't see looming because we're so focused on being proud of doing badly at what could still be done worse. Worried about how many more winters we're going to walk right into without our coats or our common sense.

In the middle of the night I wake burning with shame over every sentence I have ever said out loud, vowing to look into silence and forgetting again by morning. 

It's just that we've spent all this time growing new skins out of knives and glitter, out of early morning birdsong and long quiet afternoons, out of grief and triumph and laughter through tears. We're so shiny and pink in the parts that have grown tentatively off of what is deservedly rough and gnarled and I worry, you know, that we're going to lose what we don't even know that we have yet. That I will miss a chance to note you sparkling softly in the sunlight.

And so in the middle of the night I wake abruptly, sure that someone has just spoken my name. There's a comfort in being the smallest point in the darkest part of the night, and if I pause just right, in the space between breaths, I can hear you through the darkness. I hope you know that I know you're wonderful.

 It's almost funny, i guess, how I spent all of these years convincing myself to touch things with my palms and then it turns out that we can't touch anything at all. 

I don't know, friends. Everything just fell apart. The world collapsed and my life blew up and for a while there was no part of me that wanted to find anything beautiful. Not much has been, after all. Everything is dark and hard and cold, and people keep dying, and all of the places I love are always just a breath away from closing forever.

But the cat and I have landed somewhere full of light and surrounded by hydrangeas. We're fine and we're lucky to be so--we are healthy and loved and there are squirrels that run back and forth all day for us to watch. I am working from home and keeping mainly my own company and thinking about that Derek Walcott poem Love After Love:

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

When you remember me, in that dream you have sometimes where you're looking at a painting you've never seen before but somehow know that you've produced, remember me like this--soft and tired and trying hard. In the fall I want to kiss you like apple cider, warm and spiced, smelling like rain and fallen leaves. When you remember me, remember me like this--in a sweater and happy to see you.