Where is the Border?
Another of the workshop prompts: “Take a walk; look around; write what you see.”
Here’s what I wrote:
The wall in the sun is warm, but the stone of the steps where I sit in the shade is cool and not exactly wet but not exactly dry either, so my thighs and my buttocks–where they rest on the stone–are becoming chilled…the warmth of my skin, of the blood rushing just below the surface, is giving itself over to the stone, is taking on the cold and the damp, an exchange no less intimate than a lingering kiss.
Is there really an “outside” and an “in”?
I don’t think so.
Where is the border between the heat of my body and the cool of the stone? Skin is porous. So is stone.
Everything is.
My pulse quickens as a car comes too close. The hairs on my arms stand erect. That car has not touched me–or maybe it has. I am changed as a result of the encounter. There are diesel fumes now in my lungs. The out-breath of combustion leaves grit on lips.
That car, too, and its driver have been touched by my presence. By the milky exhaust of my exhalation. By the dust of my skin cells I am constantly shedding. By the bite of my sweat tinged with garlic and salt.
Where is the line that marks the boundary between us? Where are the guards with their crossbars and fences?
There is no me that is not touched by you. There is no you that does not bleed into me.
***
(photo by me!)