This moment.
This moment I’m exhausted, wrung out. I’m tired like you don’t feel that often. Neck, eyes, fingers, all of it.
Outside my window is laughing at me. It’s all green and waving in the breeze while I breathe this canned air. I stare at a glowy flat thing all day and tippity tap on another flat thing with little square things all over it and call it work. Would my forefathers know this work? Cave paintings and pyramids and wars with gods. Harrumph. I think that they’d say harrumph.
Them all slaying cyclops and flying too close to the sun and pushing that rock up that hill and here I sit tippity tap typing on my little shiny one thing and staring at my little glowing other thing telling myself it’s work. Is it? I think I push that rock too. Mine just glows and beeps and blinks back at me. Moss on this rock rubs off on me like green knowing. It falls off a little at a time as I scrape back the layers. I peel and scratch and fight to dig out what’s underneath and little by little something comes into shape and view from beneath. I find a corner. I rub and fuss and scrape and dig some more and finally I pull it out. There. A tooth. A rib bone, a jaw. A letter. A sentence. A story.
I dig deep in that bone yard that smells all musty and scary and who knows what I’ll find. I don’t know until I find it either, but I’m always surprised what comes up from the earth. The things the world has kept alone to itself forever. Until now. Until I came along. Is that what I’m here for? Am I a maker or a doer or just a teller? Am I the narrator of some story that you wrote? That the worker bees go build and leave to the scribe to record and pass on? I’m the grave digger. The archaeologist digging up the bones you made- the ones you fought and died for and here I sit, pulling them up and pretending I know what they mean and putting them together like building blocks that you never intended. That’s the hazard of what I do. Better to get it right or just get it at all? Make you think, make me work. Tippity tap. Tippity tap.
You go hunt buffalo. I’ll sit here and paint on the cave wall about it with your bones as my quill.
