Everything Must Go

Each day, reluctantly, I slip more deeply into this year of releasing. Everywhere I turn, a new facet of it faces me.

I strive each morning to pour myself into words and hold my presence there, crush the letters against me, smearing them on my body. I keep trying to build piles of every sensation I can get my senses on and distill them into marks on the pages of my journal. But when I look down, I see my fingers clutching nothing.

When I was growing up, they told us that a life amounts to what you accumulate over time: money and objects and affections and achievements and the admiration of people. Of what you manage to have and manage to hold. Of all my worldly possessions. (So essential to compile and share that they even standardized them in wedding vows.)

Now I watch my life—ways of making sense…