Unfinished

I’ve been writing this since
the night I pulled off the road
at Big Sur and my eyes caught
the insanity of the stars, since
the months by the kitchen window
watching the snow come down
like fallout from a despair I had
no word for, since I stopped
searching for a name and found
myself tick-tock in a hammock
asking nothing of the sky.

—from Richard Blanco’s “Since Unfinished”

I, too, have been writing this. I’ve been writing this since I first learned the words done and undone, finished and unfinished. I’ve been writing this since taking piano lessons from my grandmother in that room with the red velvet wallpaper and the fancy armchair next to the piano, since feeling her respect for the piano and herself and me—taking all of us seriously, giving me permission to do the same.

And I kept writing this when I entered middle school and then high school and our lessons became less of a lesson and more of a marveling over music as I would play a little and then she would play a little and then my grandfather would come in and turn on the brass lamp on top of the piano, saying don't you ladies need a little more light? because this was his way of joining us, his way of adding to the beauty that is never finished. I’ve been writing this since my babies were born and I, as Mother, was born with them, and so much love and so many fears for tomorrow and the next day were born too.

I’ve been writing this since I started feeling the shy edges of my soul, like a body in the dark running her hands across the wall, searching for the light switch. I’ve been writing this since yesterday when I began to wonder if my grandmother purposely left the light off so that my grandfather could come and turn it on. 

I've been wondering how we leave so many lights off, so many pages blank, unknowable, wondering if that’s an invitation rather than a curse, an invitation for others to create light, or for ourselves, tomorrow or ten years down the road, to reimagine.

I’ve been writing this since this morning when I read a line in the Psalms that asked God to “turn to us in mercy,” and my heart flip-flopped it and read “turn us into mercy,” and I whispered, yes, turn us into mercy. I’ve been writing this now—since, yes, our lives are never perfectly resolved or reconciled, since we go on holding our clumsy and beautiful multitudes in all our unfinished ways

First appeared in Ruminate’s Issue 45.