progress

I resent 

how safe 

my self isolation 

makes 

me feel

and 

yet 

how it 

also 

makes me 

sick. 

sick 

with 

a kind of 

loneliness 

a kind of 

sickening 

solitude. 

detrimental 

as opposed 

to the damaging? 

the detrimental: 

a self stranded only with itself 

the damaging: 

a self abandoned as the price of companionship.

maybe 

it’s evolutionary,

some kind of 

survival instinct: 

this perverse form 

of self preservation 

as if  

my nervous system  

knows: 

it’s better to have a lonely self 

than to have a community 

dancing on your bones. 

when does such 

wisdom 

wear 

out? 

when does it expire?  

there is a 

a rock 

and a hard place 

and I’m 

in between 

somehow 

I think I know  

I can crawl out. 

that

it doesn’t 

have to be this way 

but I fear I’m 

not brave enough. 

brave enough to test 

an alternative 

— to prove my 

nervous system wrong.

but maybe this, 

despite how it might feel,

this negotiation 

of my self preservation, 

is progress too –

as for a long time 

there was no self to preserve. 

after all, 

to have a lonely self 

requires 

you have a self 

that can be lonely. 

and so for now 

I witness 

with compassion 

the strangely 

wise 

ways 

my nervous system 

has helped me exist  

and I hope 

that maybe someday 

I’ll find the courage 

to test the possibility 

of something 

even better.