TEXTURE #008
“It feels crazy it is crazy.”
— Toni Morrison
The body goes quiet in a particular way.
Not the quiet of rest. The quiet of the self stepping back from the surface of its own skin, the chest still lifting, the breath still arriving on schedule, the hands still at the ends of the arms, nothing visibly wrong, everything receding.
You are in the room. Something in you is already somewhere else.
There is a centering that happens without your participation. The gaze arrives and places you. Not seen, exactly. Required. The object the room has decided it needs in order to know what it is. The body understands this before the mind catches up, which is why the stillness comes first, that particular cooling along the jaw, the shoulders holding themselves slightly too still to be natural, the lungs doing their work with the concentration of something that has decided to survive this by barely being here.
The spirit does not announce its departure.
It steps back the way one takes off a long sleeve shirt, the motion practiced into nothing, everything essential already somewhere else before the gesture is complete.
What stays is functional. The voice, the posture, the practiced weight of a person still present.
What leaves is the part that could be taken.
It was designed for this.
Not one person’s particular failure. Architecture. The deliberate construction of a gaze that requires you to carry the sum of what it cannot hold inside itself, everything feared wearing the face of everything that must be destroyed, and you at the center of that equation not by choice but by the mathematics of someone else’s wound.
To hold, in your body, the weight of another person’s bereftness, because they could not hold it in their own.
The cold of understanding this is different from the heat of surviving it.
The cold comes later. It settles in the sternum the way marble settles against the palm, Hermes-cold, the temperature of something given the shape of movement but made to stay.
The tax is not paid once.
It wears the way the sea wears at the base of things, each encounter taking what the last one loosened, no single wave the cause, no single morning the morning the shape has changed.
The spirit practices its departures. What stays is worn. Not broken, not removed. Worn. What is worn is still present, still holding form, only thinner now where the weight rests and the sea keeps arriving.
The way the voice still works. The way the face still moves. The way something that was supposed to be effortless becomes the thing requiring the most effort, because the part of you that used to make it natural is waiting somewhere, still, for permission to come home.
It is not always given.
What the body does with all of this, nobody tells you.
Some of it is fracture. The self that practiced leaving until it forgot the full way back. The core held in reserve so long it became the only core. The warmth so carefully protected it went cold in the keeping.
Some of it is resurrection. The portion that survived precisely by leaving.
The self that returned, even partially, and chose, again, to stay.
The body does not always know which one it is living.
Some returns feel like fracture in resurrection’s posture.
Some fractures were the only thing that kept anything alive at all.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
What I kept arriving at while writing this: the portion still in the quiet place.
The part that learned to wait and has not yet received the signal.
I don’t know if it is waiting or if it has become something else by now, something that chose the quiet permanently. Writing this did not answer that.
I am not sure it was supposed to.
“But don’t you understand that the people who do this thing that practice racism are bereft. There is something distorted about the psyche. It’s a huge waste and it’s a corruption and a distortion. It’s like it’s a profound neurosis. That nobody examines for what it is. It feels crazy it is crazy.”
— Toni Morrison
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