i could stand to lose a little.

may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old

may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it's sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young

--e.e. cummings

Loss is not generic. It is the single most paralytic happening known to man. And still, all the loss in this swirling miraculous universe is the same. It is the shadow lurking at the edges of our days, which makes us hold tighter, fight harder.


It is a fingerprint unique to each of us, woven into the grain of us; with every scintilla of growth, it changes and is as capable of evolution as any species of animal. The loss of a child, of pride, of an ideal, of a nation, of and earring, of a home. Each an entity unto itself.

But ever the same. For loss, in itself, cannot be lost. We bring it with us to the grocery store and to fetch the dry cleaning. We dance with it balanced on our heads so that even our most joyous labors are restricted by the need to remember our loads. As though we were the foreign villagers of a tired third world nation, keeping our burdens close to our center, letting it press down from atop our heads, disc compressing disc in order to continue moving forward beneath it.


Such is the scar of loss. The residue is as everyday and as everywhere as the dust., as sleep in my eyes in the morning. The left behind lost particles are as much a part of wear as the freckling of skin.


But losing scares the hell out of me. The cutting away, the very process of it. Not because I am unsure of how it will feel. I know, and know, and know again. I am by nature a collector. Of people. Of minutes. Because of that the subtext of my loss is a second heartbeat to me. Ba-bumping deeper, and more malevolent. It makes me laugh harder, until the whole of me aches with joy. My throat burns with singing into it's yawning mouth songs of joyous banishment. The very idea of that tearing feeling makes my boisterous tongue shy, and simultaneously, a feverish scrambler for its antithesis.

But that second heartbeat was born at the very dawn of joy, in the moment of my first laugh. So that I could more rightly see the beauty in things kept, so that we might know the precious thirst of holding on.

and even though we can barely stand it, even though the possibility of it is enough sometimes to keep from listening to the the little birds, it will come. It will be the shadow, dancing along behind us, and when the tearing feeling leaves, the weight of what is left becomes our gravity, centering us around that which matters most.

and these things

make uncertainty seem

so, so, small.