A Part of Things

Written by T. Marie Gagnon

There is a certain melancholy to emptying the bathwater. Tepid, with the film of sunken suds. It’s as if that water holds every incomplete or unapproached feeling seeped from your skin + it’s draining is some kind of bereavement. 

Or how the sound of someone’s voice feels like a worn in jacket. You slip into it. It holds you in a way only the familiar can, as if it knows something dear and secret about you. As if somehow that voice belongs to you.

I’ve never been good at analogies. Perhaps because I’m more prone to the direct. The frank and unnerving. A comparison feels like diluting the truth of the subject, though I love the beauty in something being just like another, a part of a greater weave.

I crave truth. 

Everything feels gravid with it. As if honesty brings special attention to how finite everything is. How important. How we rely on the sun’s rising and setting and trust it is there even when winter or a storm’s heavy veil consumes the sky.

My love and I live in a bus and the rain is loud. I wonder if the fire we feed all day in the stove is harming my three month old son Henry’s lungs. We don’t have a bathtub and when the early mornings are dark, I crave that melancholy — it’s especially potent, emptying the bath, in the morning. 

Instead I make coffee over the stove and let that scent take over everything left that is unfamiliar and wanting. This is what we do when we travel : allow the familiar to acquaint itself with the new so everything becomes like an old friend : safe and tolerant. And coffee is especially capable of this, as it is a part of nearly every place. And even bad coffee is good coffee in the right setting — forgiveably terrible on airplanes and thick with sugar on the side of a road running through the Oaxacan mountains. 

We plan to take our bus there. We plan alot of things. And dreams are enough sometimes, to keep oneself vital and alert. I listen to poets with voices like old coats, and to the rain, and to nothing at all because I think silence will prevent Henry from relying on stimulation to experience the world.

This too, is what we do when we travel: seek stimulation to experience the world. I prefer to stay long after that need is satiated, until a place starts to feel like home. Until I am welcomed to rest and be gentle and glad to be a part the beauty, the greater weave.

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