"Into the Midst of It"

-Bronwen Wallace

You’ll take a map, of course, and keep it
open in front of you on the dashboard,
though it won’t help. Oh, it’ll give mileages,
boundary lines, names, that sort of thing,
but there are places yet
where names are powerless
and what you are entering
is like the silence words get lost in
after they’ve been spoken.

It’s the same with the highways.
The terse, comforting numbers
And the signs that anyone can read.
They won’t be any good to you now.
And it’s not that kind of confidence
you’re after anyway.

It makes you think of the people you love,
How their faces look when they don’t know you’re
watching them,
so that what you see there
forces you to recognize
how useless your love is, how little
all your hopes, your good intentions
can ever do for them.

You, who have lived your whole life believing
if you made enough plans
you wouldn’t need to be afraid,
driving through a countryside
only the road seems to care about,
to rediscover every time it enters
with that kind of love that’s partly tenderness
and partly a sort of confidence
you can’t put words around.
Like the look
the people at home will give you
when you get there: nonchalant and almost too deep
for you to see, as they turn back
to whatever held them
before you came.

I almost ran over my friend while we were both biking today. I was so caught up in trying to get somewhere, that I didn't really acknowledge him. He said it was the most bizarre and weird moment he's experienced in awhile. I think I almost hurt his feelings by not saying hello.

I was too busy balancing on a bike that was too big and missing a pedal.

My face gets this weird vacant and anxious look when I'm overly stressed or tired. I never noticed it until he pointed it out to me.

I'm taking pictures again. Maybe I'll finally get out of this rut and back into the swing of things. Maybe.