March 17, 2006

Some days, I do not believe in the moon. I have read the textbooks, watched the clicking filmstrips, stared through telescopes, stretched on dew soaked grass under inky black skies and yet the moon seems a fairytale. The bright blue dome of day and solid dark dome of night are as good as stone walls to my cloudy brain when it bumps up against the curved border of my tactile experience. I cannot imagine anything beyond it.
Most days, I pretend to believe in the moon. If you asked me, I would in fact swear that the moon is solid and substantial and possessing canyons and mountains and frozen footprints and rocket burns and I would be trying to convince myself, as much as you.
Some winter days, the moon sits like a ghost shadow in a pale blue sky, refusing to be ignored and I feel an invisible cord tying me to that mysterious place that exists beyond my understanding.

Today, I see my daughter running around in her mini body, blinking eyes, reaching fingers. She is a compact universe in front of my face, asking me why the sun is sleeping in the clouds. Some days I do not believe that she existed within my body, that she lived on my blood, fed on my air. I trace her bellybutton and remember there once was a cord, a bluish, white cord that held us connected, and there are moments that I feel the ghost of it somewhere beneath my own scarred remembrance of my mother. But most days, I look at my daughter, I smell her skin, wipe her hands, tell her stories and can only try to remember what it felt like to have her elbow pushing on my ribs, her feet kicking my hips and the fluid wave of her turning within me. I remind myself to remember, because some days I stop believing in the mystery and memory of wisdom beyond me, that my skin once stretched to enclose two souls.
Most days, I am a sorry jumble of memory and knowledge and the things that feel real, like a fairytale instead of a moon, and a child in the cabbage patch, pass for real, and truth sits like a winter moon in the day, like my child in front of my face, waiting for me to explain myself.