This is not the time

Because it is gray outside and the wind is scratching the leaves toward their breaking point and I can tell the sky wants to break, too, and inside, inside I am breaking, untethering the last bits from their hiding place, unlocking the final doors, peeling the skin from every sadness I lost myself to, and I am falling too, falling toward an uncertain certitude, an unfamiliar trust, an unexpected faith that it is possible to be held so gently you can hear your cells breathing their relief, even if this is not the time to tell you, exactly, how it feels to be driving home in the stirrings of a tropical storm that has already touched down as a tornado up north, not the time to tell how it feels to be hugging the white lines as the big semis barrel through, not the time to explain how it is to reach out with a tentative hand and find a sure one resting right there on the gear shift, palm up just for you, this is not the time to contemplate the mechanics of the intimacy and hope that locks those hands together, so I will only say that it does, that it happens, that it is real, that such a moment is waiting for you, too, quiet and patient, waiting until you finish your exhausted laps, your mad dashes, your fury, your magnicently unruly longing, the credos you call out to keep yourself safe from whatever pain you think is coming, your hasty disappearance from the table, your plunging fist into the wall, your journals scribbling their resolve to keep the seams from tearing, this moment is waiting until your eyes stop searching for exit signs and your body stops bristling from the cold, waiting until your lungs flag from the effort of running away, but this is not the time to convince you otherwise or show you how it happens, because it is gray outside and the wind is scratching the leaves toward their breaking point and because I don't know when it will come, I don't, only that it will, that there is a place in those joints that unlocks when the weight of holding back and staying safe is too much to bear, there is something in our flesh, despite our best efforts to contain it, begging for release, and even in the recesses of our anonymity and desertion, we still embarrass ourselves with the lavish thought that we can be named and filled, and we are not wrong, even if this is not the time, there is a time, and it is neither mirage nor miracle but the exquisite intelligence of incremental molecules finding themselves in the clutter and cacophony of so much dust, because they will, they will, not because we've earned it or won the big prize but because this is what they yearn for, that falling and finding, that letting go and letting in, and so even if this is not the time, there will be, there will, and then it will make a ludicrous kind of sense, and you'll see how far you've had to come, and you'll see how far you've had to go, how much you had to break to break free, you will see the wisdom of those laps, that lurch, that fury, that fist, those aching scribbles, how you needed every last one of them like words need their syllables first, like love needs its heartbreak first, like leaves need the roots first to let them go. This is not the time, but it's coming, I promise you. It's coming.