Because we separate like
Ripples on a blank shore



December is the time when the earth doesn’t want us. December is the time of cold. Of that musky, wintry smell that isn’t a powder pouffe of snow dabbed onto the grinning cheeks of our Mother, it’s the rigid scabbing of her cracked and splitting skin. Dry. Drly humorous, the frost that smells like derisive laughter, and the pristine sky that’s less transparent than it looks. And the frost that creeps up our steps, and the frost that bites hard into trees and leaves, and they surrender in a hurry.. how those previously green leaves that blank spiral down, that heave of exhaustion, that curling at the corners and drift into sleep. They lay down with the ghost kisses, those flakes like dandruff that ripple from the heavens. Snow flakes, their biting freeze on your blushing cheek. Burrowed into your face, a shot, then numb. This is the tranquil, this is the tranquilized. The comatose stillness, the indifferent placidity.It’s the staying up late at night, lighting my candles and not focusing because my mind is full with frozen, crystal thoughts until I’m holding my pen over the candle flame and its melting and I’m wondering why I’m not fluid like that, why I don’t melt at your touch, until I realize I’m lighting my pen on fire. And my white paper sheets, unfilled with critiques and assignments, stare blankly back. They always win those staring contests. December is that month. That month when we go back to our childhood, our pre-childhood, when its safest in the abundance of blankets in our beds that mimick Mother’s womb, when safety is what we look for. Because December is that month, that time when the earth’s demise is spelled clearly in the fleeing deer tracks, the fish frozen right beneath the surface—of lakes, gaping and bug eyed as they watch this spectacle- the earth. The stretch and the shiver and the shudder. Collapsing into itself. Its not the puffy yawny-eyed sunrise of rose, it’s the glaring reflection of blinding white light off the snickering black ice in the road. It’s the scabbed earth. It’s the fleeing deer. And the fleeing raccoons. And the dead squirrel you ran over, and the frozen, gaping fish. Its the life thats fleeing from the reflection of its unrecognizable self. How we became this. And the retreat. The retreat back into safety. The cavernous womb. The shields of underarmor we layer our brittle and dry skin with, so we don’t crack. The cracks in the road. The unfinished homework, the underlying current that pulls us all back in. Like how even in winter the ocean waves pull steadily at the shore, they never freeze. This is December. This is the unraveling. This is when the earth doesn’t want us.



Reckoner
Take me with you
Dedicated to all you
All human beings