Theres Something About The Yearning For Platonic Domesticity That Hits Differently After Two Months Of

There’s something about the yearning for platonic domesticity that hits differently after two months of touch starvation and loneliness. I am wanting for so much that I don’t quite understand how to articulate. I type until my fingers on the keyboard sound like the downpour’s quickstep, then delete it all. And again. And again. 

Maybe there is just too much longing to write in a single piece. 

Today I spent hours looking for apartments, draped across a backdrop of rain and thunder on the pavement. It seems more than a little far-fetched, some fantasy borne of desire for a post-pandemic world, but somehow it also cradles the familiarity of coming home.

I can see it already, you know. Your plants on that countertop, my candles in that window. Us, together, sitting on that couch, crocheting like the old ladies we are at heart. A tea kettle on the stove begins to whistle. The smell of wet pavement from the street twines with that of the bread I’ve just pulled from the oven. I made buns again and you laugh that we don’t have enough mouths. 

My favorite part of searching, though, is the lack of departure dates. The endless listings operate only in “at least”s, for six months, twelve months. Indefinite. The potential in this relative permanence, to return to the people you love every night without fearing the end… 

Well, just the idea feels a little like coming home, doesn’t it?

This is getting exhausting.

You feel it too, don’t you? Our planet is choking beneath the weight of a sky that grows heavier with every airplane, every rocket, every exhale the dwindling trees can’t catch. She is drowning beneath her oceans, falling deeper with every melted iceberg.

The news repeats in cycles. More fires. More storms. Stronger storms. Too much pollution. Too much destruction. And we’re not doing enough.

Instead we watch from the receding shores as our beloved planet plummets into disrepair.

Humans aren’t all bad, I suppose. There are some of us trying to save pockets of the world as we continue to infect it. Parasites. Maybe that’s all we are in the end. Parasites that think we can conquer the land that raised us, that gave us the semblance of control that we now turn back with fire and drilling and plastic pollutants. But we can’t stop time, can’t turn back the destruction we’ve wrought fast enough and now it might be too late.

We’re selfish, and this is our fault. We drag the planet down, ruin her and deny it for personal gain as if we are actually significant to the universe, and we drag each other down too. There is no survival with a hostile humanity. Not for us, not for our tortured planet. Not for her animals, not for her forests, not for her oceans.

She’s exhausted. And I’m exhausted of watching.

Sometimes they remind me of him so much that my chest tightens.

Not trapped in a vise but like some animal inside of it is clinging to my ribs and pulling

Maybe it's an octopus

Yeah, I think it's an octopus

They can get out of anything if they want to.

The creature in my chest could leave if it so desired. 

There are other small places to hide, you know. There is no need to pull my chest inward until it collapses. Until my lungs give in. Give out.

And the suckers

They cling to everything

I see pieces of him in them, and I need to hold them closer. To not let go. To keep them safe. please.

"there's no escape from the friendship", i joke, as the octopus wraps her tendrils around my esophagus

Bile rises despite the pressure

I wonder if I will spend the rest of my days like this

An octopus in my chest, searching for glimmers of who I can never get back.

there’s something otherworldly

about watching someone’s fingers

flutter across piano keys like a sparrow

taking to the air the first time

and

there’s something ethereal

about watching someone’s heart and soul and being

as they spin and weave and leap and glide across the stage

in an elaborate symphony of movement

transcendent in their exquisite grace and height

and

there’s something inexplicable

about watching someone’s voice

twist and spiral through a room

in ballads and poetry and song

a dance in itself that belongs somewhere

greater than this

and

there’s just something magical

about people

about us

~ @a-universe-of-almosts

What a tragedy it was,

That we were all blinded

By your dazzling luminescence,

And how it glittered like a sky of stars,

That every single one of us

Failed to notice

How long and wide and dark

Your shadow had unfurled

And how it had distorted

Into something very far from human.

~ A Beautiful and Wretched Catastrophe

My moral line in the sand is not a dramatic one, I think. It is thin and a little scuffed around the edges, subtle unless you kick at it. But it doesn’t waver when you do.

Years ago, I read an article about the modern audacity of caring, about extending the basic consideration of doing no harm. It’s strange how these lacking negativities cycle back like orbits--or is it that they never left in the first place? Another anti-mask protest gathered by the park today. I close the blinds and wonder if the air will clear before the next one. 

I know I’m no pinnacle of morality. I’m a hypocrite with an edge of broken glass, and I don’t know how to forgive. And maybe that’s the core of it, really. My roommate snaps at me for being judgmental and I point the shards at her. I don’t lower my arm when it starts aching. I don’t pull open the blinds the next morning.

At sunset, someone I admire sits six feet away with a steaming mug between her sweater-paws. When her eyes sparkle, it’s only a reflection of the streetlamp. “Is it so wrong,” she asks me, “that I don’t think I can uphold such support to the people who continue to go to parties during all of this?” 

I think about unconditional positive regard. Then I shake my head. 

Later, I wonder if our lines in the sand are parallel.