our restless bodies
My restlessness sits right where my neck meets my shoulders. It stretches all the way down my right arm, crawls into the space between each vertebrae, marches up and down my jaw, not caring if it is keeping me awake.
No amount of '“self-care” will take this away. No matter how much I stretch, no matter how many youtube yoga videos I follow. There are no breathing exercises that can free me from this.
It is a hungry thing, this ache. It does not need any imagined anxious scenarios, it can feed right here on everyday conflict, everyday world news, an overwhelming work load, administrative issues, ordinary racism. It sits and eats at my too-full table, gnaws at all this matter, sharpens its teeth. It condenses first and freezes fast, turns my back rigid whenever it overfeeds, keeps me awake at night so I can keep sitting with it at the table.
The ache does not like poetry. It does not care for birdsong. Mostly when I write to you I try to keep her away for a while. When I sit and read she might let me forget about her for a few minutes. Most of the time my restlessness is only working at tiring me out, wringing my body and stretching it into impossible shapes, so that when the workday is done my mind is left unable to do anything worthwhile. I wonder if eventually it will take my body over.
This restlessness is why I keep turning to poetry, to reading stacks of non-fiction so we can keep searching for the seedlings of the next world while this one crumbles. There are so many of us restless, cranking our necks left and right, our bodies rejecting what this world is trying to make of us. Kept awake at night by images of death, of those who are not even granted a night of rest, a safe home to toss and turn in, a sleep they are not awakened out of by seemingly endless bombing.
It is of course a political thing, our being in pain together, our collective sleeplessness. There is a small amount of reassurance in knowing we are together in this space. In knowing the world does not just keep going.
Let us find not forget we deserve rest, and find as many paths to it as our bodies will allow. Let us read and write, fight alongside each other. Look at the world right where it is the most cruel, and still hold onto each spring blossom, each note of each living song of each living bird. Let us find our way to the next world, darkness taking us into her arms so we can finally sleep, our limbs softening, restlessness finally dissolving into dreams.