At All Defiant Risk - yesterday

We have this tendency to empty our lives of all the people and activities except for the bare essentials, my brothers and sisters and I. There is a baby crying inside this Echo Park library. An immigration pamphlet warns that the wrong help can hurt. This golf pro giving a lesson on television once cautioned that left to our own devices we sometimes master our own mistakes. I bring up the way my siblings and I clean out our lives because an upbringing without dirt makes a child prone to weakened immunity. Though we are strong, grown in soil, I'll give us that. A powerful constitution still bends amidst a hurricane. Last night, nothing was wrong, but I laid in bed absolutely terrified at the thought of life. I'd been trying everything I knew, all the tricks, profundities, philosophies I'd intuitively known and learned to get through this storm, while protecting and evading connection with anyone and their horrors, all those horrors that another person can bring, but it didn't work. We have to hug. I'm not just talking about romance. We have to look someone else in the eyes, hear their breathing, share something sensory.