disembodied

Here in Chicago it's what I guess they call an indian summer. There's a July thickness to the air, a sleepy, saturating heat that makes your bones lazy and wants your feet bare. The summer weather is misleading, suggesting as it does that time has not been passing, October already, candy corn in my kitchen. The disconnect's in the fall crunch of dead leaves beneath flip-flopped toes, beach-headed.

This weekend, though, I don't care how false it is, summer ex machina, it tastes like freedom and I dive in, the water's cold and delicious and wakes me back up into myself. All weekend I zoom and pounce around the nighttime city, a hoodlum on my rusty blue bike, tasting it.

During the week I don't own my body. It's not just time, those cruel limits, it's words too, politics, constrictions. Nerve-wracking to be under observation, critiqued/criticized, throughout the day. It stings a little even when it's right, and when it isn't it stings worse. Often what is criticized is so deeply tied to my own instincts that I find myself floundering, a metaphorical amputee with the best intentions. I'm tired of being told I'm kind as if it were a disease that might be catching.

I'm sure it doesn't help that I've got the sort of skin easily penetrated by others' thereness. Well, grown-ups at least. Children don't frighten me. Children don't scratch at those flimsy, fragile edges of self. Maybe it's because they are equally porous, becoming. I think it's because they listen, pay attention, in ways many of us learn to stop doing, don't have time for, as we get older. Last week my fellow resident and I had our first day alone in the classroom without our mentor teacher there. I imagine it should have been stressful, left alone with the monsters while mom's away, but instead it was the most relaxed and natural I'd felt teaching all month.

Like so much of this experience, survival--maybe even happiness--means holding onto what you can from what you're given, always learning, even on the really bad days. For me, the most important thing to remember will just be this: to listen, always, to never stop listening.