Stefan Bruggemann

I spent the weekend in motion.  I walk everywhere now.  I didn’t think I’d like it, but having the ground under my feet all the time makes everything simpler.  I get more time with my thoughts.  More time to think.  My body feels like a body again.  Instead of a meteor.  Instead of something on fire, hurtling towards a world of hurt.  My muscles ache every night: I am alive.  It’s good to know that for sure.

My new favorite thing is reading aloud.  Not performance, just sharing with voice.  I read my love poems while he washes the dishes.  He can’t catch every word of it over the water, but it’s good to make sound at the same time.  Like music, pre-domestication.  When the dishes are done, we trade back and forth—him pulling books down from the shelves in his living room, me with the same book all along.  Page after page of good sounds.

It is easy to resist simple things, afraid they will reveal too much of me, leave me vulnerable, too earnest, too much myself.  It is better to let the quiet in, to hold it in my lap like a cat that will leave me when it’s time to be somewhere other than here.