I want to remember how it feels to love like that, your heart too full to function.
Poetry from Kate Bellock: To Eric & Sable, My Mother & I Get Vaccinated on the Same Day, 500 Miles Apart, Breathe (where pain originates)
To Eric & Sable
I wish I could ask you what it feels like to be so in love that suddenly, in a bathroom stall at a roadside rest stop, you need to tell the world, however you can — by writing it on the lid of a used tampon receptacle. I want to remember how it feels to love like that, your heart too full to function. Are you very young? I like to think so. I’m glad for you, for what you have and what you left behind. And that you happened to have a marker on you when you stopped to pee. Sooner or later, a custodian will come along with something in a bottle to erase the evidence that you passed here — Graffiti, like young love, doesn’t last forever. Nothing does, but you’ll find that out for yourself. It will be a surprise, no matter how many warnings you get. It always is. Tell me, when you wrote your names here, did you spare a moment to wonder who would see it? Could you have imagined that someone like me, driving through on her way to the funeral of a boy she once loved, would see your little doodled hearts, and cry?
My Mother & I Get Vaccinated on the Same Day, 500 Miles Apart
Which is a way to say that maybe (god willing) we will see each other again. Which is a way to say that (god willing) we will breathe the same air. Which is something we never thought about before — how when we breathe in, we breathe each other in. A thing we didn’t know we did. In between our appointments I text, how did it go? A-OK, you send back, real smoothly, Dad goes Friday for his second shot Three hours later I’m in the car alone, thinking (god willing) we will breathe the same air. Which is a way to say I love you, which is a way to say (god willing), we will see each other again.
Breathe (where pain originates)
The universe breathes like we do, the universe opens and closes like we do. I draw in. I let myself collapse like a dying star folds space around itself, I fold my body and become small. This is where pain originates: in these small spaces in the body, these points of contraction where no blood will flow. Nothing can open what has closed so tightly. Think about breathing. Really think. Every expansion met with a contraction. A return. A homecoming. You think about children learning to crawl; how they crawl away and come back, again, and again, like how you breathe. My body contracts. Nothing will open what has closed so tightly. I move through the breathing world in pain. I try to open. I fail. I try again.
About the Author
Kate Bellock is a writer and library worker who was raised in the Pacific Northwest and now lives in Northern California with her husband and a spoiled pet rabbit. She is also a regular guest of the Your Favorite Bad Movie podcast and her short fiction can be found in Corvid Queen literary journal (forthcoming).