Crone Bone

I am teaching third graders, over Zoom, how to actively listen. "Make eye contact. Be generous with your attention."

Will they use this skill in their futures?

I am heartbroken today, for a variety of reasons, but the main one is I wish to have conversations, to connect with people in a meaningful way. Even this blog isn't a conversation. It's just me moving my scattered thoughts from head to hand to a public room behind many other public rooms that are discotheques of language paired with images and video. Be witty, be clever, engage with quick quizzes  -- whatever it takes to keep the viewer's (reader's?) attention for a full 30 seconds. Everyone is jumping up and down in those rooms. I feel trampled in them, bumped into, rattled. My head pounds from all the dippy filters and polls. The audio files that everyone uses for their videos homogenizes messages, plays them on repeat, while filters make faces melt into sameness, too.

I will not be a part of wherever this is headed, which is why I keep returning to this quiet space. Eventually I think I will stop writing for this empty room, too. I keep telling myself that this short attention span communication is leading to something new and exciting, that future generations will be prepared for what is needed to survive, to create. But this sort of talk just feels like the happy surface nonsense you say while your gut feels the deep rumblies of doom.

Books may be a thing of the past.

In defiance, I am reading as many books as possible and writing lengthier work no one will ever read. 

I am a chalkboard filled with words everyone just wants to clear off so they can go clap out the erasers.

I am the typewriter that no one knows how to use. 

Where do I feel the heartbreak in my body, no one asks? My jaw, my neck, the weight of my suddenly ponderous legs, my empty gut, a deep tightening in my ribcage. I hold my breath too much. 

No one cares, and self-pity is ugly, so here we are. I mean, here I am, a crone with her bones, trying to divine.