Evelyn Alt

I’ll never find what I’m looking for, no matter how many wildflower fields I walk through in my lifetime.

I tore a muscle in my arm, reaching for the words I wanted. 

They’re still just a little too far away.  

I tried to patch it up with pretty metaphors and long-winded rhetorical artistry, but the rotten similies only dug deeper into my skin, and the tangled mess of exaggerated, overused synonyms did nothing to bandage the longing in its place.

Now, my shoulder is aching and sore, and my writing is no better than it was before.

And yet, I continue to search.

I float above high-peaked mountaintops and glittering cities; I swim with schools of fish across the tumultuous, tantalizing ocean, and I fly high through the cool, blue air with the wild geese. 

I am reaching and reaching and reaching.

I am reaching for something I have found so many times outside my body but never underneath my own skin. As I move across prairies, rivers, and boundless, unfurling landscapes, the clamorous crickets are making my path, and I find what I have been searching for. 

I find them in Mary Oliver, reading her poetry before a crowd.

“You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. / Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. / Meanwhile the world goes on.”

Between her lips and teeth, the words become a song. There is a hidden rhythm embedded in the vowels; the consonants leak with intended melody. 

A certain kind of magic finds a home between the letters, but I do not know what it is. It sits at the tip of my tongue—the tips of my fingers in their endless peddle against keyboard keys—and yet I cannot put my finger on it. 

No matter how many bones I break in my reaching.

I tripped over it while making my way through a field of flowers. The field mice and flower fairies hummed up at me from my feet. I happened upon it with pages of Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous stuck to the palm of my hand.

“Like snow covering the particulars of the city, they will say we never happened, that our survival was a myth. But they’re wrong. You and I, we were real. We laughed knowing joy would tear the stitches from our lips.”

Something about those words and my life is changed. Something about those words and I know that I have yet again found what I trail over the globe in search of.

But still, I cannot reach it. 

I cannot grasp it between my fingertips or let it off my tongue. It is stuck, lodged in the liminal space between my life and theirs, my art and theirs. 

Maybe if my words were more my own, they would not be so stubborn. Maybe if my thoughts were not passed down through lifelines of other people’s poems and music and art, I would be able to satisfy this nameless craving for words I will never have. 

But they are not, and I cannot, so I’m writing this instead. 

I am writing and reaching because I cannot do one without the other. 

I am reaching and reaching and reaching.

My arms are aching and numb.

I tore a muscle, reaching for words I’ll never have, and with metaphorical, rhetorical paragraphs mocking my lamenting pursuit, I came up empty-handed.