1.
I am angry everywhere.
A friend snaps at me, I snap at my husband, he snaps back. Mouths shut tight, a thousand bees buzzing in us, together and apart, stung.
2.
Because frustration is cousin to anger, I take a walk to notice all the red things and suddenly the world is alive: red leaves on a tall tree, red berries on small hedge, red candy wrapper.
With attention, red turns more alluring than angry.
3.
After all these years, I haven't matched the beautiful names — snowberry, blue blossom, fiddle fern, red alder, camelia, hyacinth, goldenfleece — to all the beautiful things, and don't know if I ever will.
Is it enough to call it beauty and make it real, make it mine?
4.
When death is a number, we don't feel the loss.
One hundred confirmed cases. Three deaths today.
When it is a name and a life —your mother, neighbor, friend — that's what makes it real. Beauty, life, loss, needs a name.
5.
Every choice is fear or love, a friend once told me.
I took his truth and examined my life: work, love, my sadness, my joy. Love or fear, to every thing a division. But now it seems too easy and too hard. Life isn't this or that. Aren't there more choices?
Lately, everything I say is a question I don't want to answer.
6.
I'm trying to be real but it costs too much.
— Ocean Vuong, from Not Even This
7.
At the nursing home where I work, it's been months since I've held a hand, or talked soft, or laughed close. I wave down a long hall but the gesture is lost in the long space between.
In the distance today, a thin voice wobbles in song:
. . . little ones to him belong
they are weak but he is strong . . .
And I am broke open, again.
It's not true that our choice is only love or fear, or that sadness is anger turned inward. Or maybe it’s all true — love and sadness, fear and uncertainty, endlessness and urgency — all of it true.
In my anger, sadness makes a nest. In my sadness, anger rises.
In this, a voice.