careening

last night, late, when all should be quiet, my girl was weeping. this was after much laughter on our part and my being silly and dancing to a song i love from prince of egypt.

the song jethro sings as they welcome moses to the clan. i love that song.

anyway, my girl starts weeping softly at first. then torrentially.

i finally got her to tell me what the deal was. she missed oreo.

out of the blue, she went from giggling and having fun to weeping. tears. lament.

a friend had asked me earlier as we went round and round about the difference between joy and happiness, if i have ever been happy.

nope. don't think so.

i said,

maybe once, when i was young. but not after.

i couldn't, for the life of me, remember a time of happiness. until my girl began weeping. i took her in my arms and held her close. her world was circling out of orbit, threatening to plunge her into shadow. my arms were the only thing holding her from careening out of bounds.

i must teach the child how to deal with shadow. it is a difficult task but one i think every artistically inlined person needs to face. i fell into shadow yesterday but then wrote a poem and came out of it. my sister, best friend, and husband did not think the poem i wrote was a happy poem. but it was.

it took a poet to understand. and he did. i am told the opinions of poets matter more than those of my "regular" friends. my husband laughed when he heard this. he probably agreed.

i told him.

no, it is just a peculiar language.

explain this to me,

he said.

i told him,

if i started talking to you about engineering. the numbers and whatever it is you deal with, you'd know i didn't know what the hell i was talking about. right?

yes.

he said.

how do you know?

(i asked him this, because he asked me how i know people really know the language of poetry and aren't just saying that).

you know because you see the engineers working beside you and you know they understand what you are doing.

same with me. i deal with poets who write poetry. not just those who have picked up the name because they wrote something once ages ago.

i think he understood. it is a problem i've been struggling with for a great while. how to convey to my people my great love for them, while at the same time, speaking an entirely different language.

so my girl, lying in my arms, was stilled and eased into peaceful slumber.

and i remembered, i was happy once.

when i was pregnant and she was just a baby. those were times of utter bliss. times when all i knew and needed were either growing inside me or sleeping beside me. those were times of complete happiness. something i'd forgotten, until now.