EXPANSION

So here we are.

I’m staring at my computer, you’re staring at yours. But through a collapse in the time/space continuum, here we are together. While writing this in my broken armchair, I’m handling too many things at once: a chilly paper cup of coffee, the collected works of Antonin Artaud (edited by Susan Sontag), deadlines and remiss correspondences, and the provocative antics of a wise-cracking girl-child (five and three-quarters by last reckoning), all the while listening to Becky Stark of Lavender Diamond croon as if just for me “Dream the kind of a life that you will find. The kind of love that lasts forever.”

I’m glad you took the time to be here, what with the demands of life on your end too. Don’t worry, this won’t be another complaint about the pace of modern life, how all the hours get tapped away in bits of work and bits of chores, and a moment for this and that, and that moment between this and that where you just need to rest and check to see if you’ve any messages. Dictated by digital fingers of a creeping clock, full of fast paced triviality, this life (and our complaints of it) can so easily feel so full of nothing but its own rapid pacing.

But time is really whatever we want it to be.

This is hopefully more about the strange space of time, how it folds and contracts into cozy nooks for hurried moments of affection, how it spreads and expands to encompass hundreds of generations of human struggle into a graceful instant. How time, running away in all directions, can be caught and savored, and rather than battled against, how easily the running of time can be simply enjoyed. Hopefully, this is more about how unscheduled whimsicality can puncture the assembly line of schedules.

Just now, and you wouldn’t know it, I took a break for a dance party with the girl-child, we waltzed across the office/bedroom/ballroom, cheek-to-cheek, her hair smelling like strawberries, feet dangling at my waist. The words you’re now reading are much lighter than the words you read before, much more expansive than all the sentences that came before it. The lightness of that impromptu dance, however fleeting, will endure, a good and worthy moment to be alive. It made writing this so much easier, perhaps even made writing this worthwhile. It lent conviction, however lissome, to what might have otherwise been mere words, heavy and heaving with their own self-importance. A stolen frolic of quiet domestic bliss, paternal bewonderment, simple humanity. A moment of shared time.

Now back to life for both of us. You’ll move on, feet pacing, checking your phone, or worrying about traffic, and I’ll press a button and send this off. I apologize for how one-sided our relationship has been, but as far as can tell, it seems to have gone well.

I’m glad we could spend this time together.