Yesterday I was mending a fence in my yard, using my typical method of organizing tools during onsite projects, which is to say that I scattered everything I brought with me randomly through my yard in order to then have to spend most of my time looking for various things. Where is my pencil? In the rose bed. Where is my tape? On the sidewalk? No, inside by the sink for some reason.
In my mind I see myself as a kid looking out through an adults body. Which is, I suppose, how most people see themselves: as a younger version of what they have become. My mom once said that she was surprised by how her face looked, because it made people treat her in a way that she did not see herself; they treated her as an older woman versus the nuanced, complex woman that the packaging of her face, in fact, was a beacon of.
Walking around the yard of this house, repairing a fence, I had a moment of seeing my face as it was maybe seen by others, as I was not the new kid on the block, draped in youth, but actually a somewhat disheveled man, muttering to himself as he walked in circles in his yard looking for a pencil.
There is something about controlling the point to which we have arrived.
When welding, the puddle of molten metal is directed, but loose like honey dripping off spoons, as you try to maintain a direction of the weld through a crackling arc with the bead rolling onto itself like clam shells deposited by uniform waves. In nursing homes, the liquids and excrement of the old is the primary focus, directing it into something that can live alongside of what we think of as a life well lived.
One is a turbulent ride towards creation, one is trying to maintain dignity through a collapse.
In the distance between myself and another, I try to take language and shared experiences and push them to an overlap that feels like heat fusing metal, but sometimes communication is managing moments of collapse as well.
Maybe it’s a bit like no matter how I drink my tea, if I put honey in it, sometimes I always get a bit on my fingers.