Tonight’s Neuroscience lecture introduced me to the neural tube. The neural tube is the introduction of the central nervous system within the embryo. Eventually this groove in its surface will form the spinal cord and brain. Neural folds on either side of the groove are elevated until they meet to kiss the opening shut, creating a tube. And there you have the beginning of the brain, the literal backbone, the universe within a universe.

Cells abandon some dividing to start the process of differentiation–neurons or glial cells. Then comes migration–cells self-organize into various parts of the still-developing brain to create structures, and within those structures come the axons and dendrites which start communicating with other neurons, which leads to motor and sensory process. Ta-da! Brain.

Maybe it’s because I am guilty of getting stuck within my thoughts quite often. Maybe it’s the complex magic that makes up reality, body, function. Maybe it was the bike ride before class that cleared my head well enough to take this in. I don’t know. Learning about the neural tube blew doors off their hinges within me. How petty my money issues and worries or woes compared to learning that my brain developed from a groove. How wonderful to find another something amazing. I was absolutely fascinated and dizzy with the knowledge of this–the growth of a brain. The growth of a brain!

I’m sure to be reeling for a few days on this. I never want to forget this evening. One of those times where I felt substantially moved by science.

epilogue of the bear trap
I sleep in a square. I bookend my profiles with pillows and I keep two below my head. Waking means lifting and climbing’ sleeping means sinking. I dream surrounded.

In the back of the house, rotting limes. They liquefy. Porous green to a brown gray mass, happy dents.

Tell me what surviving did to us. Tight mouth and buoy boats—I’m not buying it. I stand in every aisle of the store, ignore the weekly list. I have no plans. I try to buy them, place my grip around new ones in the far back. Does everything I own have an expiration date? How is my blood? Is it everywhere? Is it obvious? Do I need more?

My coat attracts snow flakes, stellar dendrites on my shoulders and sectored plates up the nose and on the lips as I walk from the bus to the house. I push my hand into the pile of it growing on the car hood. Sometimes I like winter I guess.

While crossing a street I imagine falling again. Why do I do this so much? Imagine falling and then various scenarios trip wired in the wake. A car can’t make the turn, no one feels obligated to help me up. Imagine laying there, cheek in a pothole. How much of the world would that change?

I am pretty sure that everyone in my office loves salt water taffy. Whenever a coworker goes on vacation, a box of it appears in the common area. The packaging is always my favorite part.

I really love Danielle Pafunda’s work.

One of my goals for the year is to see the ocean. It’s been so long. Much too long.

The bowling alley makes a solid shirley temple. Although I don’t understand their latest furniture additions. And the women’s room, all red. Even the toilet tank covers in their shaggy carpet glory were a deep shade of it. Was I in the restroom, a capillary?

Another metaphor of the migraine–beetle in a bug collection, false bottomed cigar box and pinned with still twitching appendages. Giant with thumb pressed against a leaf playing dead in the wind.

Say NO to this bullshit censorship.

It is here,
tucked in the lesser referenced corners
of rotating clock,
where every suspended disbelief drops,
lunar light finding your crooked tooth
to sparkle like diamond,
to render all crickets silent and blinded,
to disorient blades of grass left bent
in the imprint of your body.

Never you mind, paper plate sun,
yolk below the mountain uncracked–
celestial salt in clumps of punctuation around
head. Sleep is not for us.

I am not a star pupil when it comes to patience, not for things like this that seem so trivial yet have such an impact that I must change the very way I walk. In the car today we passed a jogger along the road and the envy I felt boiling up in my sternum was real, real enough to be a bitter taste in the back of my throat. How fortunate and for granted we are when all of our parts work in their normal fashion. And when they don’t? Kind of like the world ends. At least that’s how I feel about it.

Aside from the hobbling, I don’t have much to say on these last few days of 2011. It occurred to me(quite some time ago) that the real celebration of a new year comes with the birthday. A more literal interpretation, one I can get behind. I’m not really big with resolutions–the whole “changing on day one” and going from there. If change is wanted/needed then by all means do it now. All this to say that I’ve reached no pivotal decision or truth or realization about the past calendar year. I own no neat bow to tie it with. Or maybe the bow can be a simple knot of splintery twine: hobbling sucks. That is all.

I am trying to find your porch light. It is dark, I am tired and miscalculating the distance between then and now.

It seems I’ve grown into something more forgiving, something soft. The butter left out, heap of deceased animal in its final coffee grind stage, right before the grass grows over it in newborn green. Guess we all swallow thick that nothing is permanent.

Lean temple and cheek on the juke box, bottle neck in the hooked J of index. The tiny sway of hips. From behind it is the saddest thing. Your covered limbs tired from arm wrestling. The fade of the street out of reach from the neon.

We go back and rebury it. The fence of your father’s house is starting to buckle.

Pull the first floor around us, draw the table and curtains into our ribs. We are starfish stuck to what built us. Moths caught in the shade making light dim.