I’m worried writing is taking a back seat. Its value is vast—it’s the oiling of an old cast iron pan, the whittling of a poplar branch, the rubbed leather of grandpa’s favorite rocker.
I worry I’ve grown too good at letting it slip. Like that Thai food place, with its masaman or tom kha and the familiar waitress who already knows your order.
There’s always a place for me at the table—napkin, cutlery, a full glass waiting. I partake, polite and practiced, dabbing my lips as though I know the choreography of belonging. And yet, I feel the edges. The bounds of the space I fill. And I press them. I push toward a new chapter, the foreign genre, the dustiest cover on the highest shelf.
I am rugged as the weathered cross in a field, certain that the sun’s revolutions will one day return me to the ground. And who will I be then? A hundred years will not have been enough. But still, the ripples remain—waves of sand and ocean, their low moans echoing in the pressured depths of nothing and everything.
In that space, the sharp tooth of light steers alone. I’m alone. Drenched. And the doorknob didn’t turn. It didn’t budge. And it is you I blame—the one whose key could twist, the one who could meet me in the smoldering embers’ final breath.
Even then, it would be more than the scatter of a hundred shooting stars, more than bare feet pressed into sand.
It would be the long silence after the tide recedes, where something unnamed still waits, listening.
Love, Jaclynn
Going On 40 