Anchor Story

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I think I went insane. I found the softest part of the flower bed outside and sank my hands into it as far as I could. I wiggled and wormed and stabbed and worked my arms into the dirt up to my elbows. I made my hands like beaks and bored, moved all my fingers freely, waved my hands as if to someone I knew, all in the dirt. I couldn’t even see what I was doing and after a few minutes of manic alternating movements and gestures inside the earth I wondered if my hands were even moving at all. Maybe I was just imagining it so well that I could feel it.

            Why was that the first thing that I did after he left? I woke up staring at the empty space next to me, feeling cold. I was confused; I didn’t know what it meant. My head was still asleep and rocky and it was forced to analyze the situation of the empty space on the bed. I imagined him in the kitchen making me breakfast. But he would never do that. I still wanted to go look for him there, or peer in the backyard and maybe see him sitting in the sun. I knew though, if I wandered around the house like a ghost I would only sink every time I turned a corner or opened a door to more emptiness. I didn’t want to see how alone I was. I went straight into the front yard and stuck my hands in the dirt. Maybe to anchor myself to the ground.  On my knees, up to my elbows in the dirt, sucked up in pain, eyes seeping slow, the weight of my entire body and even more slipping into my knee caps,  my toenails pressing uncomfortably into the ground, I just kept thinking of the word ‘corner’ again and again. What could it mean, how could I occupy myself with this word, where can I fit it, how can it comfort me. I turn a corner and I see him. He’s only around a corner, I told myself. Wasn’t that true no matter where he was? Some corner, of something, a street, a wall, the outside of a house, a chain link fence that kept someone’s dogs in. He’s just around the corner! Around a corner. Around some corner. I am too, I’m around a lot of corners. And if he just follows a few, passes a few, turns around a few, he’ll be back here, and I can take my hands out of the dirt and hold onto him for anchorage instead.