Swallowed By Time

05/01/24

Since my husband left I have no idea what to do.

Time has just become this gaping maw that’s sucking me in, swallowing me whole, digesting me.

In some ways being at work helps; just having to get up and go out forces some structure onto me.

When there, there are things I must do, and ways I cannot behave, so a level of self control is forced upon me.

In reality though, I get through work because I have no choice if I want to keep my home.

Time gets semi-tamed when I’m at work, following fairly steady, predictable, rhythms.

When I get home it stretches out, opens up its jaws again, taking me into its gullet.

The only way I seem to be able to fill it is with puking, and tears.

Or with exhausting my sister, Lena with my long phone calls, and never ending tears.

Or crashing around the internet looking for hope, comfort, answers, guidance, in tears.

Somewhere along one of my internet rabbit holes, I stumbled across a poem.

Guess what?

It made me cry.

Poetry’s not historically been my ‘thing’; I’ve come across a piece or two that’s resonated, but overall, not something I’ve sought out.

I guess this is one to add to the previous piece or two:

Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Mary Oliver

I can’t do all that analysing stuff to explain what she’s actually saying, or how and why it affects my emotions; I don’t have the skills, neither do I have the will.

It touched me, it gave me a teeny, tiny sense of hope.

Today, that’ll do me.

JP