The first thought in my head upon waking was “what can I do differently?”

Anything. Choose eggs over skipping breakfast. Walk in the opposite direction of the pond. Make a call to a less familiar friend.  Shower.

Just – anything to break the bud on the branch, to start again in a new direction. I’m not suggesting ripping up roots, or messing with the solid stuff in the center. I just know that I’m being shadowed by my own umbrageous ways, and I need sun, and a new way up and out.

A breath. A large breath. And still, my whole being rises and falls the same way it did yesterday. I need to slow it down and find the smallest possibility. Close in. I need to find the nub and the node, the minuscule swell, the most generous cell for beginning.

What will bend the branch; where will I break?

I only know it stems from here.

No grand gestures needed. No relocation, no burn. Though a storm would be welcome; ushering in the drama and the drain, pushing me forward, or back, or down. It’s more difficult, I find, to be in the quiet light of day in the middle of the ordinary, and still, wake yourself.

To be born in middle of it all, to be new in the same afternoon, to burgeon in the plain – the stillness seems a rotten place for fresh. But I know the truth of it. I know that microscopic isn’t meager; it is infinite.  Whatever will blossom, whatever will grow, whatever will wake me.

It all stems from here.

If music is love
Your life is the record
That started off clean
And ended up scratched

By someone’s careless handling
One groove goes so deep that
You skip back to it over and over
And over again

As if you will find yourself
In the empty well,
In the narrow scab of space
They carved away from you.

You were played the same way
For so very long
That the dark and deepened rut
Is now your go-to-track

Even as the needle moves
And something new
Is calling you home
You can’t hear the sound

(You can’t be found)

When you fall into the dark
All music stops
And in that static, bitter slit
Nothing can live.

Love can’t live
In the scrape of despair.
Love is drowned in the sound
Of the screech and the grind.

And when you skip to the place
I cannot follow,
You leave me behind
With just echoes of you

One verse so lovely
I return to it over and over and
Over again,
Making my own deep and tortured wound

(Another old, familiar tune).

My darling,
You must go where piano notes can climb like the stars
And I must go where cellos swell my heart to the sky
Because love waits in the tops of the trees
where the wind blows
in infinite iteration;
Whole soundtracks we’ve never heard or imagined.

Are there ways to fix
A broken record?
Surely, my tears cannot do it.

I only know that
Love is not a war
That is won in useless trenches —
And I cannot live there, anymore.

Love is the music.
And as for the record we must simply learn to play —
Each on our own,
Each in our own way.