Seek to Live a Quiet Life

            There was a time I wanted to meet each thing that happened—at a party, the next person who came through the door; the next great philosophical insight; the child who, being born, would reveal the deep truth of creation. I waited for forty years and nothing came. There was no white horse, no knight, no revived Da Vinci in khakis and covered in arm sleeves with a cigarette so sequential in smoke tufts and feathered ash where a life-changing oracle emerged from chapped lips and experience.

            There was no Godfather, no Odin, no hero.

            But there was a roll of toilet paper.

            I changed the twined, pressed, dead pulp for the second time on a Monday. Tonight, my husband will work all night. I will lay inside hours and dream of days where factories are stories I read and write about via research of 1800s lungs, child hunger—the times of industry when it was both romantic and treacherous. I will dream of days I can’t relate to in exchange for days I don’t want to think about.

            Everything runs out. There is a need to refill, to refurbish, to reignite: all the adjectives, all the verbs, all the tyranny of words.

            We have thousands of stories with sagas and prequels and sequels, ideas, and romanticism with the hopes of changing or enhancing the human heart.

            Someone says, I hate to read.

            Someone says, I hate to speak.

            Someone better than me says, Both need to be heard.