Those copies of The New Yorker keep piling up. The Business Journal, too. The design bills, the inbox of work email, the layoff notices, contract negotiations. The baby’s diapers and the household chores, the grocery list embedded in COVID restrictions. Those papers that need grading, the fear of your students’ faces and bare feet. The yard chores, the neighbors’ complaints, father’s complaints. Taxes. Funeral plans. Liquor store bills.
They pile up on the table and get moved to the floor when they threaten the ceiling. You lay them at your feet, trying to find space for each one until they rise to form their own columns and you can’t bare to stare at them but soon they’re wobbly and tall like some kind of hungry, blind teen-ager. It’s something you have to care for, prop up, one against another, until they’re all leaning on you in the center. If you let one slip they’ll all fall inward and you’ll be buried alive and God knows who else you’ll take with you. So you keep balancing the columns, bumping between them like hard decisions that can’t be made.
It’s then you realize they’re not a ‘to-do’ list, but a rampart, a fortress surrounding you, and if you keep it all up, they form a wall that let’s nothing in. It keeps you from seeing the future.
See the author’s published work here.
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