Life feels like an ever-cycling rollercoaster of loss. Sometimes you’re careening towards the bottom, helplessly watching as the world whizzes past and squeezing your eyes shut as your stomach leaps to your mouth and you know that the bottoming-out is imminent. Sometimes it’s the slow bend, a turning of a corner that inevitably means leaving what was before, behind. It’s present even in the slow climb, the tick-tick-tick upwards, that view at the top which you can never fully enjoy because you know what’s coming next.
Sometimes I’m so tired, so tired of losing, of shedding, of starting over, of falling, of getting back up, of surviving, of overcoming, of summer that means winter that means summer. But there are moments, more like vignettes really - where I am hovering above my body, watching the movie of my life - where I look up and out at the view around me, wherever I happen to be on the coaster’s never-ending track at that point in time, and I literally lose my breath marveling at the beauty of it all. Like, how I even have the capacity to be so tired in the first place! Because I’m feeling. Because I’m noticing. Because by some combination of my DNA and my daily refusal to participate in ‘the way things are,’ I’m unable to just sit back and let the coaster take me, day by day over and over and over and up and down and up and down, without witnessing every ounce of the journey.
And that is, to put it mildly, utterly exhausting.
But that is also, to put it plainly yet so supremely poignantly, life.
The losing, the bottom of the barrel, the giving away, the receiving, and the losing yet again. This is it, folks. We’re all waiting to reach THE peak, THE one that is Life! with a capital L. But, the longer I continue to exist, the more of the world and of time (that sneaky f**ker) I witness, the more I’m beginning to understand that we are already here. We have arrived. Since the day we were born, Life has been ours and as we grow older we grow too scared to take it.
Anyway, here’s a poem I read this morning that inspired this thought bubble -
Variation on a Theme by Elizabeth Bishop
by John Murillo
Start with loss. Lose everything. Then lose it all again.
Lose a good woman on a bad day. Find a better woman,
then lose five friends chasing her. Learn to lose as if
your life depended on it. Learn that your life depends on it.
Learn it like karate, like riding a bike. Learn it, master it.
Lose money, lose time, lose your natural mind.
Get left behind, then learn to leave others. Lose and
lose again. Measure a father’s coffin against a cousin’s
crashing T-cells. Kiss your sister through prison glass.
Know why your woman’s not answering her phone.
Lose sleep. Lose religion. Lose your wallet in El Segundo.
Open your window. Listen: the last slow notes
of a Donny Hathaway song. A child crying. Listen:
a drunk man is cussing out the moon. He sounds like
your dead uncle, who, before he left, lost a leg
to sugar. Shame. Learn what’s given can be taken;
what can be taken, will. This you can bet on without
losing. Sure as nightfall and an empty bed. Lose
and lose again. Lose until it’s second nature. Losing
farther, losing faster. Lean out your open window, listen:
the child is laughing now. No, it’s the drunk man again
in the street, losing his voice, suffering each invisible star.
from Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry (Four Way Books, 2020)
xx mm