I have feared the traps of my own design since the beginning. Or at least since the beginning that I recall at this quarter to semi-midway point in my life. The trap of convenience alongside the devil you know, the trap that across so much time and change so often still takes the form of marriage. The way our own fears and that pervasive sense of scarcity can trap us from even considering another way.
Of course, no one avoids freezing up. Whether they visibly spin, dissociate, or bite their nails while going through the other motions considered part of living in whatever time they have lived. But oh have I tried my best to stay in motion, to make sure I’m assessing it all from every possible angle. How I have worked so that my spinning became less and less visible through measuring out lists and calories, confining the fears to the night or to pages of journals I buried under Harry Potter cloaks in my make-believe suitcase.
From freeze to flight I raced through so many months that they now comprise the last three years. From job to job, along bike boulevards (always, somehow, leading me to California St) to new beds, kitchens, and backyards. I could not help but rest, every once in awhile, in what I feared was some form of a trap. But which was also (even more obviously now) a respite from the other growing, building, forward moving energies in my life.
There was the night we rigged up a conveyer/lever system to lower down food–dish by dish, plate by plate, and then with a cup filled with silverware–from the upstairs deck just outside the kitchen down to the unfinished garden. It was stunned by the inefficiency of our movements, and also that someone who I continued to give my naked body to night after night had spent the better part of his afternoon designing this pully system for precisely this moment. It’s true that time seemed then to be slowing proportionate to the care we needed to take so the food did not turn over and spill midair down upon the mustard greens and Adirondack chairs.
Also true: that as time moved at a breakneck pace around me, I continued finding moments of slowness like that one. That I was not always worried about feeling trapped. In fact I sought out various forms of entrapment, especially the breathless fear of open water. I found ways to layer atop that a profound responsibility for the people I brought into the water with me, both those who insisted they wanted to come despite not being strong swimmers and those I all but dragged with me.
Was it really fear, though, that lead me forward on my ceaseless search for a kind of home I would not find I needed to leave? And what name might I give to the feeling I stumbled upon, time and time again, for what I found even when I knew it would not last? Certainly it could not have been so insidious a trap that I was able to walk into and out of it time and time again. Perhaps this is what all homes are: temporary dwellings. Structures that hold us for only a season or two, before we know its time to pack our bags. Set off once more in search of that space inside ourselves where we can rest.