An Open Wound Talking to Itself in Metaphor

Today I am a shoelace tied to a moving floor.

Moving.

Again.

Again again.

Boxes become beds become car seats become silence. Mel and I drive in long spirals through something resembling a plan, or a myth, or a hallway without walls. Every time we think we’ve stopped, we’re moving again. This time it’s West Virginia. Her grandmother is 103 and sometimes she talks like she could summon a kitchen out of thin air, and I’m pretty sure she sees ghosts in the couch cushions. It’s beautiful. It’s bizarre. It’s not ours.

No privacy. No rhythms. No room to do the things that make me who I am, assuming I still have a shape. Just borrowed routines stitched with someone else’s thread. We try to be soft with it, to be grateful, and mostly we are. But the soft things bend, then bruise, then blister. And Mel just tries her hardest.

I do too. It’s just harder to see.

I won a gallery contract. A white cube said yes to me, “Best in Show!” But now the pigment sits like a sleeping dog in the drawer and I have nothing to offer but the sound I make when I stare into the fridge too long. No time, no space, no silence to crawl into. My hands feel like they belong to a ghost. And without creation, without the surge, the trance, the trance-inside-the-surge, I don’t know what to call myself anymore. I was the one who heard things and gave them bodies. Now I’m a shadow chewing on its own feet.

Art is a ghost limb.

I itch where I used to have a purpose.

I whisper ‘who am I?” into the bathwater and it burps back a foam shaped like my childhood.

I feel like there was a warning about this somewhere and I missed it, or ignored it, along the way. The un-selfing. The moment when the story you told about yourself stops matching the dream you’re in. I don’t know what I am. And I’m beginning to suspect that’s the point. The language of spiritual psychology is made of rectangles. Its a sinkhole in the middle of a chessboard. It doesn’t want to fix you. It wants to remind you that “you” is mostly noise.

You can’t heal a cloud. You can’t diagnose a foghorn.

So I just sit and wait for the divine to say “oops.”

My ego thrashes when there’s nothing to decorate.

The soul sighs when the ego runs out of mirrors.

So what’s left?

I wash dishes. I watch the sun dapple the hillside. I pick up odd jobs that taste like sawdust and stomach acid. I nod politely while someone tells me how I should be grateful. I sit in someone else’s chair and pretend it’s a throne. I wonder if this is spiritual. I wonder if it's just capitalism in a fun mask.

Mel carries us. Pays the bills. I can’t legally work still. I watch her stretch thinner and thinner and sometimes when she exhales I hear glass cracking. I tell her we’re safe. That the universe will provide. That we’re always held. But she’s the one doing the holding. And it makes my faith sound stupid. Or worse, It makes it sound hollow. I want to pour the stars into her bank account but all I can offer is trust in something she can’t feel.

It’s not that I doubt.

It’s that I’m dissolving.

Spiritual practice used to be my spine. I lit candles. Meditated. Spoke to my ancestors through the floorboards. Now I just sleep too much. Wake too heavy. Lick the corners of old rituals like dried-up stamps and try to remember what language I used to speak.

The liminal became the altar. Then the bed. Then the grave.

What is a routine but a cult you can afford?

I had one once. It looked like a studio and smelled like orange rind and linseed.

Now I live inside a shoe.

My candles are in storage. My gods are bored.

They only answer when I’m brushing my teeth or feeling sorry in a parked car.

I miss myself.

Or maybe I’m mourning the mask.

Or maybe mourning is the self.

I don’t know.

All I know is we’re here. We are in between places. For a while. In the cradle of old wood and slow mountains. We say things like ‘stack up” and “find our own.” But I think I am becoming a pile. A compost of Selves. A spiritual smoothie melting on the porch. Maybe we’ll find a place by the ocean, let the waves polish us into a new kind of quiet. But the dream feels far and sometimes I think Mel is too tired to believe. She wants security. I want something I can’t name but sometimes see in the smoke between us. Some nights Mel says nothing and I want to hug her and also apologize for everything I’ve ever believed in. Is it cruel to believe we’re safe when she’s the one doing the math?

She tucks numbers under her pillow at night. I tuck my dread under a flowerpot and wait for a sign. I know we’re okay, but sometimes faith feels like a rich person’s favorite blanket. I want to cover her in it. But I don’t know how to share the temperature of my trust.

I tried to paint yesterday and the canvas coughed.

I tried to sing and a bird fell out of the sky.

I am not the creative. I am the crease in the label.

I am the between.

I am a sentence fragment with a driver’s license.

If this is the practice, then I am a monk of mildew.

I am worshipping the rot.

I am doing nothing, and that’s exactly what’s undoing me.

But even now, even without hands or home,

I feel something blooming sideways.

Something tender in the blur.

Something watching me with my own eyes.

This isn’t a lesson. This isn’t a moment of triumph. This is me writing to prove I’m still here, trying to turn fog into language, remembering that even if I make nothing else, this is making. This page is a prayer, a mirror, a pulse.

And if you’re also stuck between selves, also doubting the point of the path, maybe you’re also just being born again.

Anyway, we’re in West Virginia.

Mel’s grandma is sarcastic.

I think I’m turning into the smell of a person.

And that’s probably okay.