Half of a Moon
Inspired by events in Park City, Utah
which resides on the unceded land of the Ute Tribe and the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone.
This morning, I sat perched on the edge of our living room couch and watched the moon slip slowly behind the mountains. For a moment it was a marble just on the cusp of rolling down the ridgeline.
But I wasn’t the one who noticed that. It was my boy who had come to stand beside me. I whispered, come here. He set down his cereal spoon even though it was full of milk and extruded carbohydrate O’s, and placed himself on my lap.
Watch, I said.
Wow, he replied.
I told him that I was a little dizzy because I could almost feel how the earth was moving underneath my feet. It’s not easy to understand until you watch the ground’s rotation disappear a celestial body.
It’s a little heady, both in the grand sense and in the I’m-falling-now way. Gravity lets us forget about the movement of the earth (even though it’s that very movement that produces gravity to begin with) for the majority of the time my eyes have been open.
When the moon was halfway hidden I asked the human in my arms how many breaths he thought it would take for it to slip away. Twenty, he said.
We counted. I re-positioned my hand to encircle his wrist. His soft skin, his small bones all within the circumference made by my fingers. This hand that had been used to accuse and to create, to identify, and to build.
So for the second half of the moon’s descent, we were fused to each other in our tiny seat in a small corner of the universe. It took more than the number of estimated breaths to remember how to love him in the bad times too. It took that expansion of my chest to understand just how much I’m always falling.
But it also reminded me that the fall is a state of being. That it’s slow enough to be forgotten most of the time. And that if you’re going to fall, it’s better to have someone sitting next to you.
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