Molecules

I wrote this while my husband and I were in the process of preparing to move from NYC to Yucatán and condensing all of our belongings down to what would fit in six suitcases. It was a lot. It's still difficult for me to write about or even think through, like my mind really can't wrap around it, even two years later. Do you have stories like that? Where you feel too close, too inside, to describe them in any way that makes sense?

Here, I tried.

The job doesn’t seem to get smaller, more manageable, no matter how many checkmarks punctuate the lists, how many packages I seal and send off across the country. I wipe the dust outlines off the shelves and walls, think about our belongings like so many dandelion seeds scattered on the wind, but the space won’t empty. 

Kris talks about shifting molecules. After each imperceptible step, unraveling thread by whispering thread, we look around at the unchanged spaces and announce, “Molecules.” And I wait for the air to loosen, a soft bloom. I wait for it all to look like less - less enough. Like leaving. 

I know that “enough” is somewhere between a moving target and a lie, but I still reach for it. Just beyond my grasp, it’s winking, calling. 

“You are a priority,” says the motivational text message. “The world is a better place simply because you’re in it,” says another. When I say the words to myself, they rattle and click like pebbles in my head, no echoes rippling. 

Sometimes I ask myself what I think and listen to the wall of static that responds, up too close to the image and it’s only distortion and shapes that won’t be sounds until I can turn the dial that telescopes us to scale. 

And my hands are neither free nor full, only fruitless. ‘You know how they say sculptors see the shapes inside the stone?’ I muse to no one, or everyone, or just myself. I shake my head. 

That leaving can feel like loss continues to surprise me. At first, I think the relief will fill me up but it goes out like a tide. I map the absence with cautious fingertips, reaching into the darkness and wavering: hoping I find nothing, hoping something reaches back. 

I used to think a lot about why I was alive. It was a difficult question. I guess it is for most people, but it looked easier from where I watched, studied, tried to normal. My answers were wild, increasingly bleak. It’s hard to look back at then, especially when it feels like I might turn to find a mirror (worse: a plaque with no room for my name). 

Sometimes, I imagine that I can peel myself away from myself and see all around me. There’s the back of my hair that’s managed to evade all products and attention. My feet in fists, the ruminant worrying of my teeth against the inside of my lip. What is a life? myself asks myself. 

A former colleague sent a message about the future. And how will you be changing the world? she wrote. Myself looking over my shoulder blew out her breath: well, shit. And the screen yawned, and the future wet its lips, and I waited. To feel. To know something. 

I believe you should exist in as meaningful and frivolous a way as you please, that your life is precious even if it fits into your pocket when you leave the house. But am I? Is mine? Maybe I only think I’m walking forward. Maybe I’m on a loop and it’s always the same pebbles that I collect, turn over, discard. 

Service can feel like purpose until it doesn’t. Giving can feel rewarding until you open your hands to accept and find they’ve worn clean away. A body you’ve fought to claim can still feel like the house you are haunting, the stairs you can’t climb, the walls you can’t touch. 

You could ask me what I’m missing, or what I want, or where I’m going. The answers are all the same. 

What have you done in small steps, molecule by molecule? What's something you believe is true for other people but not for you?

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