everything takes up space

I have too many things in my head. I used to be able to hold it all there and have infinite room for anything. So I don’t have any practice at not letting it all in. Writing helps. Because it’s not just work and what I have to do next and how I should approach this and why is my bank account so low and where is my next flight. But it’s also wanting to know more about that thing I saw and how I feel about what happened that one time, the people I need to take care of, and my happiness, my anger, my frustration, my hope, why I love.

You think to yourself, this is so small it takes up no room at all. But everything has weight. Everything takes up space. And that’s what I don’t remember.

So I try to focus and hold the rest back, and it’s like trying to hold back a downpour, a tsunami, with a paper program from a student play.

Some things are important. Some things only seem important. And sometimes urgency is dictated by timeliness rather than priority. I want to put everything in a jar, like marbles where you have to guess how many are there to win a prize, and I want to shake them out one by one in the right order. I want to line everything up like dominoes: over the tables and on books and through corridors and around corners until every last thing is laid out and I can see it all clearly at once, even if I have to climb to the top of a mountain to have it all in view.

But it’s all so small that some of it slips away. The wind catches it – a silk scarf, a tiny torn-off corner of a paper napkin. How can I know if something’s gone missing?

And I feel so heavy because I’m carrying it all around, all the time, so I don’t lose it, and there’s no where else to keep it safe.

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