The State of All Things

I like things that can wilt.

My bed is strewn with flower-emblemed pillowcases that will never, ever die. And on the wall is a flower pulled from some field and pressed in a book and preserved in a little glass casing in a frame, forever. These are the things isolated to singular moments of self. They will never change. They will know neither growth, nor the entropy of life abounding, unchecked.

(And I sometimes am after preservation too hardily.)

I love the in-betweens of things. But I am afraid of them, too. The limbos that feel impregnable, interminable, insurmountable. Motionless, I call them the Moments of Frozen Molecules.

And sister winter comes on strong with her battalion of icicles and ponds frozen-over and my heart just stills alongside the rushing water. Can you feel your own heart slow? Have you tried to induce the sensation of things stilling? 

And we look at the things that are barren -- the trees, our bellies, the slick sidewalks, the arms of our coats lay slacken over armchairs. Things unfull or no longer full, or not yet -- and we see the emptiness of things and not the shapes that hold them. Look at the web of a tree in the wintertime, see its limbs outstretched, see the vast multitudes of things its empty arms could hold -- and you will see a tree in its loveliest state.

I promise. 

I know no peace better than the one that comes from seeing things through.

But, I am learning to look -- or trying to -- at things not in seasons only, but in moments. In isolated seconds.

The states of all things as they are.