thank you

more please

It’s early and I’m texting my vet whose name is Paulette and I find this funny and I know it won’t be funny once the coffee kicks in so I am holding it carefully, this small stupid joy, like an egg I found on the sidewalk.

This is what I do now. I collect things.

I was twenty-three with a furrowed brow and a sleep schedule like a drunk on a bicycle and always a little hungry, a little sick, a little proud of it. I thought the furrowed brow was a personality. I thought being tired all the time meant I was paying attention. I was so in love with my own suffering I used to accessorize with it. I’d wear it out. I’d wear it to dinner.

I don’t do that anymore. I do something worse. I say good morning to strangers who don’t want it.

The dog gets the full unedited stream. Every thought, every fragment, every half-formed thing that crawls out of my mouth before I’ve had coffee… she gets it all and she looks at me like yes, continue, I am with you, I have always been with you. The deer on the walk gets a hello. The birds are singing and I am listening, actually listening, not just logging the fact of birds the way I log everything, the way we all log everything, moving through the world with our little clipboards going: birds, yes, noted, moving on.

I don’t want to move on.

I want to stand there and let it be insane that birds exist.

!!!

That sound exists.

!!!

That I have ears and they work and somewhere in the evolutionary chaos of everything that’s ever happened, some small creature developed the ability to hear and here I am, still using it, standing on a hiking trail at seven in the morning completely undone by a bird.

!!!!!!!!!

How did we let something that beautiful become a fact.

I am stressed more than I am not. I find new rooms in my cathedral of anxiety the way you find rooms in a dream: oh, this was here the whole time, I just hadn’t opened the door yet. I am a fist of knots. I complain with real artistry and I’m not stopping, complaining is one of my spiritual gifts, I come from a long line of women who could find the dark lining in anything and I honor that tradition daily.

But I make wishes on eyelashes. I see 4:44 on the clock and something in my chest goes mine. I am texting Paulette the vet and finding it funny before the coffee ruins it.

No one is giving out the magic. I looked around. I waited. I checked.

So I’ve started making my own and I’m carrying it in my pockets and I’m spending it like I have more than I do, like there’s always more where that came from, like the world owes me wonder and I am here to collect :

thank you, more please, thank you, more please