the bigness of the world.

You know that overwhelming feeling of holding the bigness of the world?

Sometimes I think I just feel the bigness of the world so deeply and strongly that my little human body can't hold it all. I think I've felt this my whole life, even as a young child, especially as a young child.

Suddenly it's 1988 and 2001 and 2014 all at the same time,

and my friend is dead too young while I'm alive,

and the moon is waxing and rising and the sun is burning and the waves are rolling in,

and someone somewhere is feeling anxiety in their heart and I feel it too, here.

It is all so delicate and precious and fragile and immense and incomprehensible.

It is beautiful and horrifying and shocking and miraculous.

And here we each are, breathing it all in, all of it.

I don't know why some feel all these things and some don't at all.

These past two days I've had intense reactions to food and my mother said to me on the phone: You've always been this sensitive. Sensitive stomach, sensitive skin, you're just a sensitive young woman.

And so I am.

I don't know what any of this means, the largeness and complexity of it all that tumbles from my body in tears or shouts or fitful sleep.

I feel it intensely and try to make sense of it all anyways,

usually not getting beyond the panic at the fullness in my chest or forming the beginnings of one sentence in my head, before it slips away.

It is too great a thing.

But I'm here now, putting down words in the midst of the squall and breathing a little easier knowing that I simply cannot hold the bigness of the world in my human body.

I simply cannot.
 

And what a relief that is.