Cannonball

In the bathtub this morning, I was working on sections of my book. In my head. I find that it's a lot easier to think about it than to type it. I was thinking about describing the bird tattoo on my arm, and about its significance for me. When one of my friends first saw it, he said: "It's definitely leaving, isn't it?" I answered that it was flying. "Yeah," he said, "But there's flying away and flying back home, and it's definitely flying away." Slowly, I realized he was right -- and that while I had flown away (left my marriage), eventually I was going to need to fly back to the nest and rest.

As I was having this realization, I was also falling in love, which made the idea of resting in the nest infinitely more pleasant than it had been for the last handful of years. I started to fantasize that my man would get a tattoo of a nest on his arm, and that's where Annie (the name of my bird) would rest. Looking back on it now, I consider this a step in the right direction -- I was willing to surrender before I'd completely exhausted myself from flying, to be fed and kept safe.

This morning, however, I realized that the nest, whether or not it is ever manifested as a tattoo, belongs on my body; that I need to contain both the capacity to fly and the space to rest right here in my very self.

And then I heard Damien's voice, a voice I listened to over and over again after I left my husband -- the phase in which I had flown but refused to consider resting, the phase in which I lost a bunch of weight because I refused to be fed.

Looking at the lyrics now, from a considerably sunnier vantage point, I'm not sure exactly what to take from them:

Stones taught me to fly

Love taught me to lie

Life taught me to die

So it's not hard to fall

When you float like a cannonball

But I think maybe the point is that in order to really know something, we have to understand both that thing and its opposite...