Anonymous asked: hi
yes, but the question is…how hi?
why do we become such strangers?
Because I’ll Never Swim in Every Ocean by Catherine Pierce
Want is ten thousand blue feathers falling all around me, and me unable to stomach that I might catch five but never ten thousand. So I drop my hands to my sides and wait to be buried. I open a book and the words spring and taunt. Flashes—motel, lapidary, piranha—of every story, every poem I’ll never know well enough to conjure in sleep. What’s the point of words if I can’t own them all? I toss book after book into my imaginary trashcan fire. Or I think I’ll learn piano. At the first lesson, we’re clapping whole and half notes and this is childish, I’m better than this. I’d like to leave playing Ravel. I’d like to give a concerto on Saturday. So I quit. I have standards. Then on Saturday, I have a beer, watch a telethon. Or we watch a documentary on Antarctica. The interviewees are from Belarus, Lima, Berlin. Everyone speaks English. Everyone names a philosopher, an ethos. One man carries a raft on his back at all times. I went to Nebraska once and swore it was a great adventure. It was. I think of how I’ll never go to Antarctica, mainly because I don’t much want to. But I should want to. I should be the girl with a raft on her back. When I think of all the mountains and monuments and skyscapes I haven’t seen, all the trains I should take, all the camels and mopeds and ferries I should ride, all the scorching hikes I should nearly die on, I press my body down, down into the vast green couch. If I step out the door, the infinity of what I’ve missed will zorro me across the face with a big L for Lazy. Sometimes I watch finches at the feeder, their wings small suns, and have to grab the sill to steady myself. Metaphorically, of course. I’m no loon. Look—even my awestruck is half-assed. But I’m so tired of the small steps— the pentatonic scale, the frequent flyer hoarding, the one exquisite sentence in a forest of exquisite sentences. There is a globe welling up inside of me. Mountain ranges ridging my skin, oceans filling my mouth. If I stay still long enough, I could become my own world.
