It’s a hard time to be a person.
and it is for everyone I know—it’s as if we’re all sleepwalking through one darkness after another, full of hard edges and sharp teeth,
a monstrous alive that can feel so much more real than dreams (which wait soft in the corners—dusty, hot and sweet).
When I was a child and I couldn’t sleep my great-aunt gave me warm milk and honey;
she gathered up the dark, smoothed it out and tucked it in around me, telling me story after story. mostly I asked for Cinderella, but later I would know Scheherazade.
later I would know that it was not the one who lost her glass slipper or gave up her marvelous fishtail,
but the princess who promised, again and again, to weave her stories from the dark who was the most powerful. Of course it was.
We stumble now through a wounded night
that breathes and bleeds and expands according to our deepest fears. There are those who would like nothing more
than for us to exude this collective fear—
against the taste of blood in the back of our mouths, against the slow (and not so slow) erosion of human rights, against each other.
but to tell the stories is to carry golden thread through the shadows. To know that we can leave hints & clues, pathways of bread crumbs for one another. Find your way into the story—the one that tongues the truth. the one that is at the heart of it.
The creeping dark does not have to be more real than our dreams. and yet the stories do not, will not tell themselves.
Our stories: the ones they do not want us to tell. the ones they want to erase. especially those.
but even if we are sleepwalking through the gloom, as long as we are writing into the wound, as long as we are living the telling… we will continue, because we must.
We will continue.