Ten.One Thousand & Sixty-Eight

1. 4:04 am.

2. The sound of the sprinklers running, streams of water smacking against the metal pole of the basketball hoop.

3. Overcast morning. I watch the light get brighter and brighter.

4. “It’s a good thing you went to Resistance Served.”

5. Time to shut it off. Take a break. I take the journal and the two books to the hammock.

6. I write and listen to the thud-thud-thud of plums falling from the tree.

7. I remember how I told her that container gardening is not the same as having beds, working directly on the earth. The body doesn’t have to work in the same way. What I loved about finally having a garden space was the physicality of it all. How did she say it? Not the same somatic experience.

8. I’m a glutton for punishment.

9. Let it be easy.

10. The breeze and the light. The lengthening of days, as if time has not already stretched itself out enough.

11. “Sometimes I didn’t suit the people. Sometimes the people didn’t suit me. Sometimes my insides tortured me so that I was restless and unstable. I just was not the type. I was doing none of the things I wanted to do.” - Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road