It's Just Been Too Damn Hard

How have two months passed since my last post? Time slithers through my fingers like the memory of dense fog hanging onto the edge of darkened streets. At times, I've felt like I pulled a fold of the earth over my head and made a concealing pocket of cool dirt to hide in. I've watched with disinterest as the worms have burrowed by and the roots have dug deep. I haven't had words or the ambition to write them down. 
My state of being isn't any one event, one root cause, one dramatic whoopsy-daisy that can be circled in red crayon on a calendar. More like the finger of a curious child-giant reached down and flicked off the party lights, blew out the candles, and left me in the twilight. 
I can survive. MS, the old witch, isn't winning this round. I think of her sitting on her bony arse in her mushroom brown lair plotting new recipes for neurological destruction. In her best wicked voice, she challenges me: think you know what pain is my pretty, think you know?
What she doesn't seem to ever learn is what a tough old girl I am. A snippet of scripture often floats through my head on my darkest days, "I know the plans I have for you..to prosper, not to harm." This is what I cling to-not the spiteful strafings and clawed swipes of MS.

What the Dead Tell Us 
about Heaven and Hell

for Sara

Brett Ortler

They explain it in stories. 

In one, there is woman in a garden 

of a ruined plantation where the bricks

of the main house burned

long ago, but the terraces are still tended,

and gardenias grow in groups

of three or four. And a man is with her, and he loves her. 

But it begins to rain, the water is cold on their skin, 

and in that moment he knows he will go north and lose her.

For the first time in his life, he believes in heaven and hell,

not as far-flung countries, but as twin cities, 

with skylines in plain sight of one another,

both borders lined with billboards and bright lights,

and he realizes how hard it is to hear the difference 

between a city full of worship and one full of wailing

and how easy it is travel                                 

from one to the other.