Chain Link Fishing Net

In the grocery store a mother pushes a stroller stuffed with her screaming infant. All at once I feel an aching yearning in my chest to be the baby in the stroller. To cry and shit and scream and snot, to have my mother close by, to be held.

Now I'm looking at the pre-made salads. A voice inside me says I want that. Another voice that sounds like my mom tells me to not be lazy, to get the ingredients to make it myself. But I’m tired and I want somebody else to prepare my vegetables, chop the lettuce and do other things that I am capable of doing. I surrender to this want. I curl up inside the gentle feeling of spending $8 on soggy lettuce and cheese and eat it on the car ride home. It feels like the kindest thing I can do for myself.

The knot in my chest waits ‘til I turn off the lights. Then it makes itself known. I scratch the skin wrapped over my sternum, trying to get inside and untie it, like two chain necklaces tangled around the back of my neck. The futile act of trying to separate them only leaves me frustrated, with knotted shoulders too. I wonder if it will always be this way.

When I look back at old things I wrote I can tell I hadn’t yet surrendered to this feeling. I can tell from the cynicism in my voice. The fatherly numbness I feel towards all things.

Now I feel like a fishing net. The flow of grief washing over me, through me, all around; then the strange feeling of a fish caught in the net. These fish are made of small achievements, a phone call from my dad, the rare moment when what I’m eating tastes good.