The Asking: The Grip

1

Somewhere in today, life rubs, and it is already sitting in one particular spot before the story about it gets told. Maybe an errand shoved off again, a conversation being walked around a third time, a name that takes a small effort to hear without flinching. Whatever it is, it tends to ease off and then return to roughly the same spot by evening. Where, exactly, is it sitting right now? And underneath the account of who did what, is something being held on to there, or not?

2

Pick up whatever object is nearest the hand right now, a mug, a phone, a set of keys, and hold it the way it gets gripped during a long wait in traffic or a hard phone call, tighter than its own weight ever asked for. Keep that exact pressure while ten slow breaths go by. The wrist tires long before the object does, and somewhere in there the fingers stop feeling the actual shape of the thing at all. What does the extra tightness buy that the object's weight did not already need? And where else today has something ordinary been held at that same needless pressure?

3

This morning arrived with a weather of its own, apart from whatever the actual sky decided to do outside, and for a while it colored everything within reach without asking permission first. It can be named in one word, without the story about where it came from or whose fault it was. Some part of the chest or the shoulders was holding that word the whole time, whether or not it was ever said out loud. Has it changed since then? And did anything actually have to be done to it for that change to happen?

4

Objects are the easy case, the way a library book is easy: it goes back on a date fixed in advance, and a hand that knows this rarely grips very hard. The harder grips form elsewhere, on a person whose staying feels owed, on how something has to turn out, on a view grown too dear to examine, on the self as it gets performed for whoever happens to be in the room. Which of those bristled just now, being read? And if the bristling one were also called a loan, what would the hand actually do with it before evening?

5

When a grip has been found, there is one more place worth looking: at whoever is doing the holding, the one behind the name on a form or a photograph in a wallet. Turn attention that way for a few breaths, past the name and the habits that come attached to it. Nothing has to be produced and nothing here is owed. Is it a solid thing looking back? Or is it one more grip, standing in for the one that was supposed to be doing the gripping?

These questions are not answered here. Carry one into an ordinary day and see what it finds.