It’s sopping outside so you have been granted permission by circumstance for an indoor day. The stars or the clouds have aligned with your favorite TV show release day of the week (currently, Wednesday) and you came home from morning drop off with a coffee and a breakfast sandwich and a sense of having an itinerary, three new releases to watch while you cruise around job sites. There is very little agenda to life lately. Unemployment can mean many things to a person; for you it is not exactly confusing but it is broadening–it is a gap in the flow of things that is wide enough for all of your possibilities and fragilities. You have become acutely aware that what you CAN do and what you OUGHT to do may be divergent answers. Or that “ought” is a currently extremely sheltered facet of “can,” something that’s been hard to see or hear because of the bombastic nature of data points like “career,” or the idea that lives have a narrative trajectory. This notion of trajectory is, you realize, a semi-truth. The blocks of self may have been stacked up to build a castle, but that is not to say they can’t be razed and shaped into something else. You realize you don’t have to be an aesthetically refreshed version of what you were. You realize that the future doesn’t have to be tumor-esque additions to an unchangeable base.
Since you left your job, 40 days ago, you realize that you may be what looks from the outside like a heap of blocks, a pile of rubble. But you remember something about piles of blocks: they are invitations as much as they are remainders: invitations to build something, perhaps; but maybe even more, to engage with assemblage for the pure joy of it; to get to ask, again and again, even if unconsciously, what if this, what if this, what if this.
The ifs, infinite. The blocks, durable.
You have missed writing. You set its block out nearby so that you might consider where it goes.
Jackie Lutzke 