the way it all bleeds together

I spoke to the god of war on thursday on a rainy drive to the city to purchase a table for the hallway that I’ve coveted for months.

I paid seventy-six dollars for the table and carried it into my car with the help of the reedy older woman who curates the secondhand shop as a source of revenue for her church

and kept my reeling to a minimum until I was alone and driving home.

I’ve always loved the car; I take long drives alone to grapple with myself, moving too fast for the world to keep up, or ask me what the hell I think I’m doing.

so I drove.

and I thought: I need to buy new windshield wipers before winter really hits and I find myself changing them out at 7:30 in the morning, in the snow

and I thought: I don’t know if I’m ready to grapple with the metaphysical implications of being able to dial up the god of war for a chat

and I thought: am I losing my mind?

and I laughed; of course I’m not.

our snowblower needs repaired before the snow comes; last year we had a smaller needier child and everyone got sick and it snowed 18 inches and we were stuck at home for three days because even when I was well enough to shovel, my husband wasn’t well enough to watch her for two hours. we were fine, of course, but we were trapped, and I don’t do well in confinement.

it’s October now and I’m thinking I’ll do better with my second winter in Minnesota.

well, I’m hoping. there’s no such thing as knowing, anymore. not the knowing I thought I could have if I were only better smarter stronger saner; turns out, that was never in the cards for me.

I used to fall in love with autistic men. the sort of man who locks the center of his soul behind a vast and lovely labyrinth and moves through the world as though he can know any god damn thing at all. the sort of man who insists upon his knowing, whose seemingly coherent grasp of life made me sick with envy in the hopes that I, too, could learn how to be coherent. and rational. and sane. I couldn’t find my footing in myself; I was full of gaps and skips and twists and I thought that if a man like that could love me, it would mean those gaps would be filled. those knots unknotted. that if they loved me I would make sense to myself again.

a part of me still loves those winding clockwork men, and the souls that shine through the cracks in their coherence. but no matter how beautiful it is, you can’t steal that kind of thing for yourself, or cram yourself into the cracks. and their love was never going to fix me.

my only quibble here is that it isn’t so much about fathers

I tried for over a decade, but I never made it work. and it was too much work, the trying.

instead, I talk to the gods.

not because I wanted to, but because I have to. because my project of excising the mystical was in retrospect obviously doomed, because against my will I found myself with the soul of a fucking poet.

so I’m cramming this, whatever it is, in between my daughter’s imperious summons, wondering how far I’ll get on the problem before she gravely takes my hand and leads me into her hip-high world, to dine at imaginary picnics and tend to imaginary wounds. (no mommy, not like that, you have to hold it like this. like this, like this)

luckily her world is kind to poets.

my mother called a few minutes ago, I didn’t answer not because I don’t love her but because I like to pretend that it doesn’t all bleed together, that I don’t have to turn on a dime from my beautiful daughter to my tyrannical toddler to my recent metaphysical upheaval to my mother’s woes and worries and ambitious half-formed plans.

I just changed a dirty diaper and after this I’ll change the laundry and maybe tonight I’ll confront my sewing machine and learn to add darts to a shirt. and maybe I’ll write a poem

or talk to a god.