It’s the same story every morning. I want to get out of bed, make sense and order of my life, alphabetize my worries so they’re easier to find. But instead, I’m writing a sad poem about the grocery stores of my youth—lobsters crawling up tank walls, wooden bins filled with pickles. One grocery store had a local magician who set up a card table and performed tricks, and I understood him only in the context that we both seemed out of place. I remember Easter egg hunts in grocery stores, though that doesn’t make much sense now, either—reaching behind jars of spaghetti sauce to find a plastic egg filled with artificial grass and jellybeans. Holding the egg, rattling it, I felt that it didn’t belong to me, that nothing really did—which reminds me of the phenomenon known as the overview effect, experienced by astronauts looking at the earth from space, trying to understand themselves for the first time as something that exists outside of it, feeling as if they could reach out and pinch it between two fingers, no longer able to claim it as theirs. Sometimes sleep is unreachable like that, your anxious thoughts swirling like galaxies in the solar system of your mind, and other times when you close your eyes you feel as if you’re inside a Yayoi Kusama exhibit, relishing the wonder of nothing making sense. Who says art must make sense in order to be interesting? Why not throw words into a bag, shake them up, let them loose, see if what comes out makes you turn your head sideways, makes you see things differently? What happens when this verb brushes the arm of this noun? One of the great mysteries of life is that everything is, at once, big and small. The universe is an industrial sized dryer that we’re all tumbling around inside, and our socks keep getting sucked into black holes. This poem could have been an email, which would have said something like: I feel like I’m standing on the edge of losing you, and I could jump, but after freefalling through space, the landing would be soft. All this, all these words, and the landing would still be you.
