Sweet Potato Haircut

Oh, the blank page. Oh the heavy presence of absence that wears steadily down until you forget you are carrying the weight. Your shoulders get strong. You can build four legged tables and four legged chairs with salvaged wood and a hammer and nails. You can eat copious Wheat Thins and fill your attention with the assuaging pleasures of food. You can wander through the hotel of your thinking mind- on some floors you wade through shouting and music and nearly incoherent chaos, while others are deserted, lonely, haunted, and others even reverberate with desolation, with crumbling walls and empty doorways. That elevator ride can wash the day away. Then you can scrub your space of impurities, spraying sickly sweet chemicals and sweeping all the neglected corners for a sense of refreshment, of recuperation, of starting anew. You can indulge in the ever present solace of the fresh-aired outside world, wondering with awe at the bark of the sycamore, at the chattering of the evening birds, at the pearly tail of the deer disappearing through the trees. You can read, you can watch TV. You can call someone you love to talk about the progression of your day, reliving it over in your mind with an examining eye, qualifying the enoughness of your time spent, of your own existence. It can get murky for a moment. Then you pour a drink to signify the successful completion of another day, you pass the evening gently awaiting sleep to carry you into tomorrow. And when the dawn wakes, there again is that blank page, staring you in your fearful face and daring you to witness her. When, or if, you’re courageous enough to face her, you sit. The urges swell with waves of compelling unease to begin the day, to eat the Wheat Thins and wash away the mysteries of emptiness, but you sit. And as you watch the urges swell and cease, you feel the strange sensation in your shoulders of release, as the heavy presence of absence is no longer held at bay or pushed away, but embraced. The absence of action, of words, of explanations, is no longer a burden to be beared but a friend to be entertained, a reality to be engaged with instead of ignored, an invitation to give attention to the aliveness within you, wondering when you’ll wake up.