i want to melt.

Perhaps just settle in, knowing that whatever you're giving is enough. Whatever you make or eat or do or not do, is totally and completely and positively enough and totally beautiful.  

-- Stephanie Perkinson

Angelo comes in every day with his red-and-white Igloo lunch cooler and sometimes I walk in on him in the kitchen standing at the table scarfing down his breakfast, embarrassed. He's difficult to understand but I know he gets upset when his back goes out or when kids mess with the toilets or when someone steals his hat, and I know he's in every day by seven and out by three. He's the nicest man around (there's no one else around) and in a strange way I'm grateful for him.

He's like the man on the bus, the elderly one who hobbles on to face no empty seats (it's crowded at 5pm) until a younger man gives his up, without even hesitating, and stands holding the bar.

Or the woman sitting in the back shouting into her cell phone about hospital visiting hours and PriceRite and whether or not someone just farted. Or the little girl sitting behind me, dangling her feet and saying, "Weee!" giddily, quietly so as not to disturb her mother too much, as we pass through the Thayer Street tunnel. Or the Asian woman and her daughter I see every day, both donning backpacks and holding hands and hurrying to get off at their stop downtown.

The bad is good and the good is bad and in the end none of it really matters. Or rather it all matters. They all melt into one, into One, and soon there's no difference between the bearded guy in the Converse shoes smoking a cigarette outside his shop and the bearded guy begging for change on the sidewalk, showing his hospital bracelets as some kind of proof that he "just got out" and needs help, desperately. Soon there's no difference between gritting your teeth through family tension and drama as you breathe deep and count backwards from ten, and riding in the car in peace listening to This American Life amidst raindrops and heat coming from the vents, warming your face. Soon there's no distinction between happy and sad, loud and quiet, sleepy and awake, sunny and cloudy. It's all just as it's meant to be.

And I want to melt into all of it. I want to melt into life and make no more distinctions, no more differentiations, no more judgments and scrutinies and considerations.

I want to glide through life pain-free, seeing the trials as acceptable and the joys as fine, and even the pain as okay. (Because it will never be pain-free.)


Let's melt. Let's melt into a low, steady hum of being that neither drops too low nor rises too high, existing on a perfectly informed and satisfied plane of existence.

Reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn alongside the likes of Rumi and Mindy Kaling. Lying sleepily on an acupuncture table while the needles burn, for just a second. Proclaiming yourself gluten free and taking some bites of the pastry-wrapped brie because it's nearly impossible not to. Hitting the snooze button in a haze as your brain decides it'd rather be awake then snoozing, despite the available extra nine minutes and the warmth of the comforter and the lack of sunlight. Smiling down the sidewalk and frowning down the sidewalk.

The black, and the white. The gray.
The iron grip, and the release. The melting.

Like Angelo the custodian and elderly men on buses and little girls with backpacks.

I want it all.

I want to melt.