An Essay on Normalcy

I imagine Friday’s eyelids butterfly kissing the open blue sky in its early. Another night down, sleep in scarcity. Plenty of time to finish that thick-bound novel I just started. Seven o’clock’s unfolding feels a hundred times opened, like a worn letter’s body. It's leathery history, something somber, something holy.

Cocooned around a search for comfort, I can wonder: what can the past illuminate if I’m patient? The past-worn path of fear is well-marked, but I find myself perpendicular. It seems I’ve almost settled in too deeply- into ‘normal.’ This normal, however, has not an ordinary atom in it. How rare to have accepted a circumstance, an illness, so radical. The chaos of need and desire. I am learning advocacy, desperation tucked into an ordinary’s breast pocket. A ‘just-so’ existence, leaving my abilities skeletal. In October: appropriate, though unnatural. 

Traffic builds on the 25-north on-ramp as a fried egg sizzles on cast iron somewhere else. The New York Times sails toward the neighbor’s doorstep with a quick whoosh. I imagine its systematic unfolding. In soft, wrinkled hands: headlines, comics, and crosswords poked through. Someone sets down a ceramic mug- aromatic, steaming- on the kitchen table, for their love. 

In some way similar, I set down my heart in these words. I methodically search, as if a puzzle, with an answer to earn. I’ve tirelessly tried all this time, but that’s not what it’s made for. I must feel my way through as an act of intuition. There is no answer. Oh, how the world would implode if it knew how vain its search for one is.