The problem with loving is when to stop.
I pulled the lavender inside, keeping it from the smoke.
It has forgiven the elements already and reaches for, with wispy tendrils of sun starved fronds, for the drapeless window.
I shake my head at our spiritual juxtapostion.

What if I offered you little pieces of my heart, one bit at a time, so you wouldn't even notice you held it?

A feather
A cottonwood bud plumped with autumn
A squash seed
A sunflower petal
A walnut

You wouldn't even notice,
the pieces would be placed absently on your altar
next to the photographs of your great-grandparents.
You wouldn't even notice me there. You wouldn't notice the eek of the walnut cracking or the petal rustling.
Oils of the seed leaving a single drop.

I still love you.
I still love you.
I still love you.

Even, and especially when, I come apart.

Photo of Emmy, 2017
Quote by Kiran Millwood Hargrave

Note to self:

Touching, swinging, primate,
parsing details
Sitting with confusion

"Here we are, trapped, in the amber of the moment. There is no why." -Vonnegut

So it goes.

I've been swinging lately, shifting weight from hand to wall, bending the core of my will around the spaces and moving through them deftly.

Once I was a room.
An impossibly big room that fit jokingly, like a father's robe around a child.
But eventually I grew into it. 
Or perhaps it shrank?
It was a corner room, with two brick walls meeting, laden with enormous windows secreting leaden weights which lifted the glass from tarred cords, somewhere inside their frames.
To fit properly I started sewing the holes, deft thread in and out, closing the cracks - the material beginning to show form and match itself to my shape.
I filled it with music, and ran my hands along its edges to familiarize myself with its shape.
As it began to know me, it grew comfortable, and collapsed itself onto my skin gratefully. 
It breathed as I breathed.
In every corner, and even on the broad parts I hung bouquets of yarrow. Asking for the stuck energy to filter away, letting the fresh in. A protective spell cast.
We knew each other, and that is all I can say for what love probably is.

Now I find myself in places with many turns, not open, like the room I once wore. Curved and nooked and slim. Made for bodies to come into contact, to crash a bit. I always find myself calling and singing around these corners, anticipating the eventual collision of another body, perhaps clicking their way around. It's strange actually how seldom we actually meet. There's always a bubble that seems to catch us. I've begun to say, "Excuse me," rather than, "I'm sorry," in these moments.

"The body is not an apology," Sonya Renee Taylor let's us know.

It's ok to exist and get in the way a bit. Impossible to avoid unless you are a ghost really. One day.
But not today.

In this place of many turns I find myself swinging. There are
dirty points,
smoothed points,
worn,
grooved,
of many quick grasps where the weight is shifted.

A quick story to explain what I mean:
There is a black bronze statue at the Grotto in East Portland, that sits overlooking the scrum of highways connecting Oregon to Washington. It's of Mary holding a slumped Jesus, her left hand extended in a gesture of .. grief? confusion? questioning why this useless violence that has happened?
There is a sign below the statue which makes observers aware not to touch the statue.
It's let's us know the bronze material is very sensitive to human oils.
Yet, despite this warning, the finger-tips of Mary's outstretched hands are patinated, touched by the oils of many hands. The fingertips stand out, gleaming gold in spite of the obsidian radiance of the rest of the statue.

So many hands seeking perhaps to comfort her. Seeking to redirect their own balance in the space.

It's an extension of our movement, these pivot points. These spots that indicate our movement, the smoothed altered surfaces we return to again and again.

And it reminds me of our ancestors. The old wise ones. The elders. The ones who lived in the trees. The ones who made smooth the branches of the jungle, who's hands were so much stronger than ours now. Of course I'm making some assumptions. I'd like to pretend I feel them in me when I move through the spaces, hands always catching my balance from wall to railing to pillar to door knob. The feeling of fallen and caught weight, the feeling of swinging through spaces. The feeling of singing around corners, of narrow misses always, but rarely crashes.

The way we move around each other, singing and dancing and touching. Making marks, touching, leaving our prints.

We are not ghosts yet, we cannot pass through one another. We move in our spaces and touch. We leave an imprint. We leave a path in our wake. We are always, always swinging.