Hiding behind someone else’s desk to escape my favorite lines of questioning from people I respect. Crying on my momma’s front porch as the sun goes down and everything is bathed in firefly light, all warm and gentle. Campfire but electric but organic but not really. Maze of contradiction, tears stop quick cause the quota is small. My capacity is small. I’m poorly equipped for the essential, but the tangential is a garden. Sometimes I imagine where I would be if I had learned how to sleep the way the sun has always told me to. But I am too in love with the night and I am too afraid of the day to be anything other than halfway to everything.
A halfway boy
All bound up in sugar,
Clinging to patience,
And the mythic peace
I taste and ignore in favor of
Pretending to be Tantalus.
Hold me in the halfway, O God. Thank you for bringing me this far. I remember days where I hadn’t yet moved. Mornings as a growing boy spent decaying and shaking and waiting. When you haven’t started yet, there’s not a real destination but I sure drove fast. Stagnant days. Air is thick and you’re swimmin thru the grocery store. But the air isn’t so thick these days. I’m driving slower, and there’s motion and places to get to. I’m in the middle somewhere, and some nights I get so scared.
Halfway brings its own struggles. You learn to want to move but you haven’t grown into the habit. You see light and close ur eyes cause oh it is bright and oh how comfortable I have become in the night. The day is loud and bustling, energy of a million lives all bouncing off one another in an awful racket of competition and speed. O there is beauty and light by which to read it, but I am easily distracted and even more easily discouraged.
Halfway is stretched thin, timid and slow. Cloudy and sloppy, a lazy carer. Maybe not lazy, but certainly unfocused. Shakes in the evening. Memorizing patterns in the floor. The most active and least productive wonderer u ever seen. Bad talker, undiscerning listener, scared hoper.
Halfway is a partial forgiver. It is still learning, a young’n with love and faith and mercy in nascent stages. Halfway is its own parent, prone to coddling, prone to defensiveness. Prone to fear, prone to impatience. Picking up the dust bits of mercy and faith and love and piling them into something more significant; something worth mentioning eventually.
Halfway is all questions, the kind that write themselves in the fracture. Wants to grow into certainty in its envious way. It is not so good at knowing itself, instead trying to paint pictures all detailed and dominant of the things its jealous of, heedless of whether or not they exist or even could exist. In the perpetual painting state, halfway tries to skip steps. Keeps you at halfway if you’re lucky. Halfway wants the answers but doesn’t know how to ask the questions and wouldn’t recognize em if it heard em.
Halfway doesn’t know how to be lucky, even if it’s lucky. It doesn’t look much further than the instant and it cares mostly for the cause and effect, giving only cursory attention to the meaning and the experience. Halfway likes the fast cause it absolves ya of needing to be honest. Honest in the good ways, simple ways, whole ways. Honest takes time and I don’t think i’ve ever taken enough, certainly not as much as u deserve.
Halfway is halfway fair and halfway kind, halfway patient and halfway strong. Halfway what u deserve. Halfway is tears on the porch in the firefly night. But it’s better than back at the start where there are no tears and driving too fast and caring too fast and thinking too fast.
Part of the problem, I don’t know what I’m halfway to or even what I wanna be halfway to. Not entirely, anyways. Maybe that’s ok. Maybe that’s all halfway is; learning what being there should be. Halfway gentle still paints spiders into the wall. Halfway patient still doubts the truth of all that warmth. Halfway kind still cuts its prayers short cuz convenience. Halfway whole knows it can’t stay here and it’s learning how not to want to.
O God, hold me in the halfway. Don’t know. Maybe it’s not time to know. All I know is I got some things I need to be and none of them are halfway. O God, hold me in the halfway, O God, hold me in the halfway, O God, hold me in the halfway.
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