Day after day the rain comes in the evening, the windowsills wet. I eat an extra cookie, the chocolate melting bitter and sweet and sticky on my tongue, crumbs on the couch for sure, and put Sprout to sleep in his bouncy seat in the laundry room.
Yes. There with the fans, and the rhythmic satisfaction of clothes being turned and turned again in sudsy water (a task my great grandmother maybe did by hand with a washboard in a basin, and before her women at the creek bed, knees pressed into the silty mud, pounding with stones) there is a snugness that lulls him. The fan drones and the wash whirls back and forth, and beautifully, without a fight, he's asleep.
So. I've been moody with this rain, the humidity making my hair curl and my skin stick. I have 10 tabs open in my internet browser and I’m on the verge of tears, right on the cusp of everything as usual. It's so terrifying to contemplate doing more than whatever it is I’m doing right now. As in: sending more work out, figuring more things out, putting my heart out there in thin lines of Times New Roman double spaced and waiting for whatever.
It's terrifying to sit here on our stained couch with sore boobs (Sprout nursed less than usual today, but he was just as chummy and darling as ever,) contemplating what else could be a reality soon, or never, or maybe. What if I make it?
Sometimes that question is almost as confounding and daunting as What if I don't?
Here are the things I suck at: organizing, networking, time lines, deadlines, and synthesis. Here are the things I am good at: sentences, earnestness, heart, metaphors, and dreaming.
Between those to columns are the three words that Nike made so very famous: just do it. Sometimes that feels impossibly hard.
Sometimes I don't even know what that looks like, doing it, going for it: where to begin?
Breath. I come back to that. And then I go back to my browser with it's ten open tabs and try to make sense of my life.
You? What are you good at? What are you utterly miserable less good at?
And: Which is more terrifying: attempting success and failing, or failing to attempt success? Ha!