Instructions for Safekeeping

Art has a habit of catching a sleeve when the cliffside starts to look like an open door. Go ahead. Learn who built ruined abbeys and why they kept ringing the bells long after the roof caved in. Spend an hour searching for the one verb that sounds like rain hitting the tin gutters. Let some odd devotion mend you the way moss quietly takes back a stone. Follow those dim lanterns of your first delights. Paperbacks creased like weathered bark. The creek where your sneakers filled with cold and you stood anyway, ankle-deep in minnows. These are the places that still pronounce your name correctly.

Spit out the nail you’ve been holding between your teeth. Composure can become a room with no windows. Choose the embarrassing tenderness. Choose it until it ruins you. Choose it again. Then, let the dark gather itself around you like earth heaped gently over bulbs in October. You are not responsible for the morning. You do not have to drag the sun uphill. Sleep, now, until this new bitterness dissolves in your mouth. Sleep until your voice forgets its sharp edges. Wake to the chilly linoleum under your feet, the small shock of it, this dazzling world beginning again with something as simple as standing there barefoot—your body still here, miracle enough.