Order or Chaos

Apr 12

Green Confetti or Ten and Two?

I came here to burn. To split atoms with my fingernails, to taste the frequency where consciousness dissolves into spacetime. But today the garbage disposal is choking on a hair elastic—the one that snapped while I was pulling my hair back to lie in bed and map how trauma vibrates through bloodlines at exactly 40 hertz, the same frequency that makes buildings collapse.

The noodles have been floating for three days. Bloated shells of my good intentions, each one a small accusation bobbing in water the temperature of disappointment. My fingers search through the pasta graveyard for the black button while my skull buzzes with the knowledge that shame and empathy fire in identical brain regions, which is why my friend Celia can feel everyone's pain except her own.

She's drunk-texting again from the book club bathroom: "Did I really tell Jennifer her husband cries during sex?" The phone screen glows against my palm, and I can feel her neural pathways misfiring through the glass, alcohol suppressing her prefrontal cortex the same way childhood terror does—both creating the same desperate reach for connection that burns everything it touches.

The disposal button clicks. Cold water spirals counterclockwise around my wrist, carrying away three days of paralysis. I should mow the lawn. The grass has grown reckless while I've been horizontal, feeling the quantum entanglement humming in my bone marrow—how every family's trauma response connects to every other family's, how the universe might be one giant nervous system learning to regulate itself through eight billion experiments in surviving love.

My phone buzzes. Another cousin's Facebook meme about welfare queens, posted from her double-wide where she rations her daughter's insulin because minimum wage plus medical bankruptcy equals choosing between breathing and eating. The same cousin who sobbed when I explained how satellites nudge asteroids off collision courses using nothing but solar wind and seventeen years of mathematical prayer.

But she can't see the asteroid heading for her own kitchen table.

I pull on shoes that smell like yesterday's defeat. The lawn mower cord snaps back against my knuckles—once, twice—before the engine catches and roars to life. Grass explodes in green confetti around my ankles, each blade a small celebration of entropy. My phone vibrates against my hip bone. Celia again: "I think I'm having a panic attack in the Starbucks parking lot."

The cosmic understanding lives in my fingertips, makes them tingle and my temples throb when I see patterns others miss. How the boy in chapter twelve who needs someone to scream "I love you" silently into his chest is calibrating the same nervous system my grandmother had when she hoarded bread in her coat pockets until the day she died. How every character I've ever written carries the DNA of someone I've loved back from the edge.

I turn off the mower. Text Celia: "Breathe. Count backwards from 100. I'm coming."

Because I’m still not sure how ascension works—maybe I will find it in Starbucks parking lots where friends dissolve into their own unmetabolized terror while I hold my phone like a prayer and drive toward whatever's breaking, again.

The universe expands at 67.4 kilometers per second per megaparsec. My Honda Civic putters toward panic at 45 mph through suburban streets lined with people who think consciousness ends at their skulls. My hands grip the steering wheel at ten and two, the way Mr. Halpin taught me, like proper hand position could keep anything from falling apart.

Sometimes when I lie in bed at night and my mind swirls into a tapestry of synesthesia and I see the colors of all the drama-  Celia's panic a burnt orange spiral, my cousin's rage electric yellow static - are the same color of particles expanding from the original bang, I think I am here to burn through every illusion that keeps us separate. But then I remember—I have to hold space for what's cracking open in aisle seven, between the protein bars and the shame.

A revolution in parking lots, as I pull in and park improperly in a delivery order spot, silently will my presence to stay grounded as the cosmos rearranges itself through ordinary Thursday emergencies.