23

Green and green, imagined forests and walks around campus, fantasies of collaboration and struggle, reading for hours, reading until language: green, outside: green, body: green. Growth is an opening I step into to become a follower, knowing how to lead is not knowing where I’m headed, a way of trusting the path that the body makes of itself, figures. Green and green—and behind that more doors, more hands keeping the knives away, more reasons to peer deeper into the space intuition makes, unfurling like a fern over a matter of days. Language becomes a little smoldering pile, marked up with pencil and folded twice over. This week a book of essays kept me at a distance. It’s so hard to stay there, the distance of interest, of curiosity. I want the disorientation inside the crystal ball of it, to be covered in the thing. I want the depths of the insides to spill down pages and drip across the spine, onto the floor. Why go if we won’t let some part melt along the way? Why walk if we can’t pause and look down at all the little black pieces of gunk on the sidewalk and think—gum or sap or trash or shit or what—and then keep walking, keep going and still write it down.