Things broken or discarded, their importance faded, redundant, obsolete, nostalgic and translucent, a pentimento of themselves, so once-important, so formerly vital, so currently irrelevant: to be unencumbered by them, a joy.

Unsettled, I await resettlement, a refugee of the moment, unsettling. My beliefs are changing, the things I believe; do I believe them? Are they a system, or unsystematic? Asymmetrical, I wobble. Sometimes I make a noise as if something is loose, perhaps about to fly off and break something.

While I meditated the other day my father stopped by. He was smiling, beaming down approval on me. I felt like I sat in the sun. He has been dead since 1975. My view of him is completely changed. The earth has shifted beneath my feet and I face a new direction.

We should all be able to sit around a table, you and yours, me and mine. You should bring your kids and boyfriend to swim in my hotel pool; I should come to your family picnic, your poet friend, making a smile out of a rhyme for them with love and joy, swim and splash and make fun. I am only a person.

Great - I mean really great - with little kids but with teenagers not so much. Who is? but she is an improving being.  I manifest, she transforms.  It is a little eerie.  I think I'm always right, sometimes inconsiderate of what I say, speaking out of fear or anger. I am improving. We are. Awash in a tide of hormones and mental illness, required, periodically, to train not to react, to be mindful, not muddy, to see and hear clarity is a long swim in a swift current often tiring.

When your first flounders, refusing every float you offer, kicking away the life ring with shocking repetitive conviction, you begin to think it your future. When your second soars, you are partially forgiven, cautiously vindicated. You return in improved confidence, in turn infecting the first and things begin to happen, more relief than surprise. He is heavy to carry, heavier as we age.

Still I would buy an apartment near you to spend a week out of the year, one with said pool and said table, a pool table where we could try various angles between the possibilities of us all and see which ball ends up in which pocket, observe the ricochets and the physics and psychics of spin. Speaking purely of intellect, our bodies with their commitments understood, accepted, uncontested. Respect is integral with love. The oft-mentioned cup of coffee possibility a bonus if achieved as no achievements will ever be asserted in my heart, much less coveted or longed for. I could be there, you might come, any outcome acceptable.  I can always write. 

You wrote for catharsis and questioned its poem-hood, but music, symbolism and imagery synonymous with your thought processes (that I love so much) emerge effortlessly in your work. Simply trust it. It is your life view, anew. You have no need, but I am always grateful for those scant moments in which (you think) I have a use. It is a vanity I enjoy.

I understand it is with perhaps some redundancy and obsolescence, my feelings oft professed by now probably a little too well known.  Understanding, I am mindful without expectation, always ready and happy to serve those I love and those I have yet to love, and especially those I especially love. I am neither broken nor discarded, but mostly redundant and obsolete; let us therefore be unencumbered and joyful.

My Servant has laid the tools upon the workbench, the desktop has been cleared, the task calls me to completeness. I intend therefore to complete this compelling and important task along with several other same. I will not be idle. I will be quiet, but not silent. I will remain.

All my love,

Jess