Where I’ll be
We wake and we are not ready to be people. Not yet, we say, not before coffee, and the morning waits, quietly, while we look for our phones.
We drive. The traffic stops. We grip the wheel, furious about being held here, now, between the home we rushed to leave and the job we can't wait to finish. On the radio a voice is singing if you need me you know where I'll be. We change the station.
Monday we grind through. Wednesday we tell each other we're halfway. Friday we're almost happy, and the weekend passes like a station we don't stop at, and Sunday night we lie awake dreading the week we'll spend dreading the week.
Once, at a red light, between songs, the car goes quiet, and something almost — then the light turns green.
We book the holiday a year out and cross off the days like a sentence, and on the beach, day two, the end of it brushes past us. We push it down — we're here to relax — and it stays down, the way pushed things stay down, until the last two days, which it takes whole.
We buy the bigger house and fill it. We eat past full, because fast is how we eat, then drive to the gym to burn off what we ate to fill the hole, then eat. This is insane. We call it being good.
And all we want, by the end of any day, is rest. Not each other. Not purpose. We're too far behind for those. Rest first, we say — then we'll get to the rest of it. So we sit, and the television talks until we sleep, and when it stops, that silence, for a second, before we reach for the remote —
And at the end of it, the long rest we promised ourselves. No alarm. No boss. Nothing between us and all the time in the world. And we cannot sit in it. We never learned. Nothing, it turns out, takes practice, and we practiced everything else. So we fill it — the cruise, the wine, the little jobs — and we miss the work we wished away.
And all this time the song is stuck in our heads. We hum it in the car, in queues, at the sink: if you need me you know where I'll be.
Everywhen
If you need me you know where I'll be. You look for me in the things you buy. I'm not in them. I'm not in the wanting either. I watch the boxes arrive. I watch the rooms fill up and the hole stay open. The hole was never the shape of anything you ordered.
You look for me in food. You eat fast, faster than the body can answer, and get up from the table still hungry. You have a saying: focus on the donut, not the hole. And you have. Faithfully. But I am the hole. I'm what the sweetness goes around.
You look for me at some other time. Not now — you're quite sure it isn't now. You know how the days go. The coffee, the traffic, the week you lean out of, the weekend you fret away from Sunday lunch.
And the big rest at the end, the one you're saving for — I've watched you arrive there. The days finally open, and there's nothing between us but the hours. And you can't sit in them. You never practiced.
You were afraid of forever. I know. The floating in the dark, the clock that never stops. There's no clock here. Eternity isn't a long time. It isn't a time.
So where am I. Not in the noise — though I've got nothing against the noise. I'm the quiet inside it. The gap between two thoughts. You pass that gap ten thousand times a day, carrying your name, your plans, your grievances. You never look in.
I'm in the body you drive around like a car. Under all the thinking there's a hum. That's me. You're so rarely home.
I'm the space that holds the furniture. The nothing, you call it. It holds everything. Every night you fall asleep and come to me and remember none of it, and get up, and call it rest. At the end you'll come the same way. You won't be lost. The wave isn't lost when it lies back in the water.
I don't want anything from you. I know that's hard — you've been taught that everything wants something. I don't miss you. The sea doesn't miss the wave. Missing needs distance. There isn't any.
Be still. Even for a second, between two breaths. Not as one more thing to get right. More the way a field, at dusk, lets down its light.
I'm not hiding. I never have been. It's just that stillness can't be bought or hurried, and you've been busy, and the shops were open.
Before the wanting, after the wanting — if you need me you know where I'll be.
