Proprioceptive writing inspired by Mending Wall, by Robert Frost
Wall between and within, out-side and beyond. Our realities are laden with walls, not only keeping us in but keeping us together. Binding us. Preventing us. Connecting us in some paradoxical way.
Sometimes I hate this, the barriers between this world and the next, defining this hallucinated reality but not another. You would have us stay here; my not wanting to matters just a smidge to you.
When they are too porous, they come to me, either leaking miasmic juices on others, or dripping with the seepage of others in their lives. They reek either way. I am the master of walls on those days, in those hours; Nehemiah proclaiming the utility of a solid home to call one’s own. Some days I am a wee bit too proud of this skill, this cause.
Boundaries are the distance needed to love you and me simultaneously, it has been said. Perhaps. Yes. Perhaps, yes.
Other days, I scream at you for this blasted wall, this veil of Moses. ‘I want to see, I want to know,’ I yell, holding a nibbled—no, devoured—apple in my hand. You are silent 99.9% of the time, and that .1%, that taste, that ort of bread and dribble of wine, is like dopamine not serotonin, like meth not meditation. Blasted boundaries.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall. You set them but do not love them? Is that it? You set and tear down, hoping we learn something.
How is it you come to us fully clothed from a world we can see only out of the corners of our eyes? How is it we can know you but not build a wall around you? You who are so near and not. I miss those days of liminal time and space and vibrancy, where there were gaps in the wall that two abreast would walk through. But now I walk with others and wonder about you being the wall between us, keeping us together, inside and out. I(wall)Thou. You meet us there but utter only questions, rhetorical, of course, and did our hearts not stir within us?
The bread, like stony walls, is broken sometimes, and the crack in everything shines light.
[…]
This last year you have pushed me far into this world of gappy walls, and yet my time to reflect on them feels like the poltergeist hallway, stretching out exponentially farther with every step. Most days, I know you aren’t going to take me into the core of that dripping apple, so I turn away from you who doesn’t (always) love a wall. But that’s not the whole truth. The whole truth is more akin to fear, fear of losing my grip on this reality, of slipping away from this agreed upon hallucination and into the one or a one that would leave me or have me leave others, and for what? For what.
The other truth is that we as a species do not like to feel our fractured inner worlds. Yet you keep bringing me ones with walls so high between their selves that the one hand does not know what the other is doing, where a sentence is started by one dissociated identity and finished by another. Lord, what are you wanting of me with these walled off people within people? Do you love a wall or not? Do you want the gaps or not? Are we all just walled off, dissociated identities of you? Are we? Oh, what craziness that must sound like. But there it is, in my professional and personal lives, where the walls need rending, or do not.
Walls of skin and stone, words and ways, hope and doom, nation and wood. You call them into being and tear them down, black holes of gravity and love, until the nearness of matter erupts into a new creation…Are you amused by this? I believe, in my heart of hearts, you are. And I will dance on, dance on your walls, dare myself to jump and succumb over and over again to vertigo, cling to its towers, flatten myself on its cold surface, turn inward and feel the atoms within me connect to those without of me and disintegrate into your wholeness…
…would it be so.
Bread in the Desert 