collapse.

Collapse. 

Written by Karis Rose.

Collapse occurs on both collective and individual levels. I am interested in the phenomena of breakdown—the collapse and consequential rebuilding of identity. The collapse of concepts propels individuals and societies alike into complete disorientation and breakdown. Humanity exists delicately, in the ever present possibility of collapse. The collective anxiety that thrives as a product of this instability can manifest in nearly all aspects of human life. It often motivates an intense need for control.

When we are consumed with the need to control we are no longer flexible. Unlike the branch that can bend and adapt to the various stresses of nature, we are prone to break. It is important to recognize that breaking is a common, even orderly, part of nature. I mean to say that breaking is a synchronized response to a pressure too powerful to allow another outcome. It follows the laws of physics. In this sense, the breakdown, as mystifying and devastating as it is, is a particular response to particular events and thus “happens for a reason.” Sometimes, it is the disguised means of our survival.

one month in.

the waves don't come in gentle here on this beach;
they crash like bolts of thunder and swimming is highly discouraged
because the current is stronger than human strength.
i, naive, blonde, american girl, am swept away the moment the equator is crossed,
the tides of another language, another skin pigment, another currency
carry me away from terra firma, into an ocean of change.
all five senses are forced into, startled into abrupt awakening:

i have no choice in the matter.

i hear the world in french,
the nasal vowels and the conjugation grinding like mortar into my infantile ears.
i see the world as distortion in the mornings,
when i awake to canopy of netting, to the indentation of her body of dreams.
i taste the world as vapid and heavy in the evenings,
the sky, cloudless and dark, hazed over with saharan dust.
i smell the world of my adolescence,
already-charcoaled lungs fuming with the bitter hash--that distinctive scent of
ambition and inhibition smoldering, like ashes, into the night.
and i feel, so often i feel, the world as:

i have no choice in the matter.

but people back in the states, they would say things to me like
wherever you are, there you are.
give god, yourself, and africa a chance.
surrender, in breaking you, will make you unbreakable.
and i am beginning to see, in the current of atrophy, the disarray of senses,

i still
always have a choice in how i will respond.

the leper in me.

if i am a leper,
and jesus has healed me,
the scales no longer clinging to my eyes,
the lesions' contagion no longer tearing away at skin,
then why am i living on mat,
paralyzed by imagined impoverishment?
and if he trusted me to stand,
but instead i lie here,
would it not stand to reason that
i have an altogether different, altogether worse
form of leprosy?
i wonder if jesus knew this-
if he knew, when he asked the 
'are you willing to be made clean again' question,
that if the answer was anything other than yes,
it was a disease even he could not heal.

i know my disease and my disease is
never wanting to be where i am, never resting in the
mountains my faith has moved, never letting my yes
be resounding, instead of feeble and dubious.

i wonder if jesus knew this-
if he knew, when he was asked the
'help me overcome my unbelief' question,
the admission was the gateway to belief.

two days before.

their t-shirt rags covered the worst of sins, and i had hoped--implausibly and without fail--that the stains inside of me would be wiped away too, just like the dust particles they evicted every saturday morning.  waking up to the scent of lemon pledge and the musty burn of the vacuum cleaner was as certain as waking up to sunrise.  my father's therapist stared him down one day and sent him home, huffing and puffing he was, to heal from the disease of order.  his assignment for the week: to grit his teeth and let the shoes stay in the kitchen.  i think, to my dad, the closet was always italicized, always something that should stop someone in their tracks; something that says, this is important, this deserves special veneration.  to my dad, the closet was the only home for our coats, our shoes.  the rest of us may have shared his belief, but belief without ensuing action didn't impress god and didn't impress my dad either.  we'd leave our docs, our pumas, our heels on the kitchen tile and he would--implausibly and without fail--toss them in the closet.  until the therapist ordered otherwise.  he made it two days before we feared suicidal intent and begged him to return to himself.  it's better to have an alive, albeit persnickety, dad than a dead one.

always, our friends' general consensus upon dropping in was rather unanimous: 'for god's sake, it's a home, not a doctor's office!'  they didn't know, and i don't think we knew this either, that sanitation was a way of incarnating salvation.  this is a very pharisaical admission, but as a child i always felt clean on the inside when i had cleaned the outside.   my muscles still constrict when dirt and disorder collect and i start to feel claustrophobic in wide open spaces if no patterns or limitations exist. 

i've always known my need for cleanliness is a 50/50 win/lose.  the order i impose on the world around me affects my perception of life, of humanity, and of morality.  the problem arises (and i think this is the 'why' behind the therapist's assignment) when i assume the imposed order is reality.  it's not.  it's a fantasy, a game of control.  but it is what i've known; what I've been bred into--the diseases that own me, rather than me owning them.  but i've been given a gift right now, in this moment.  the gift of awareness.  life is disorder and i am a fallen creature and so are they and accepting this--this universal condition--rather than raging against it and trying to make amends for it, is the way to redeem it, to let god redeem the fallenness in me.

if i spend the next two years as a foreigner, learning to accept--even if i accomplish nothing else--i will not have wasted away those years.   

Home, away from.

In 22 days, after more than a year of waiting, waiting, waiting for departure, I take the flight.

For so long now, I have lived as a reluctant nomad without ever stepping foot on foreign soil.  From the moment I chose her, I knew I was also choosing culture adaptation, mosquito nets, vaccination after vaccination, the French language, flights across the oceans separating me from my family and my home.  I was choosing Benin--her first post assignment as a foreign service officer.  Sometimes the fear of the foreign is writhing in my body; almost always, it is writhing in my will.  I don't know how to be nomadic ("unsettled" is its synonym) externally without feeling nomadic internally.

But I know I am not called to stay in reluctance but to accept, with self compassion, the transition from winter to amaranthine summer.  And when I step off that plane, my feet sinking into the earth, into the fear, I'm going to remember home is not here; home is not there.  Home is the Abercrombie/cigarette scent of his Honda, the drives he and I took across the highway of our shared, broken memories, my daddy's outstretched arms, the lingering in my fingertips during Schumann's Traumerei, the needle in my mother's hand stitching patterns she can undo, the choking of her voice in front of two witnesses, the feel of my feet landing on pine and dampness during a solitary run.  

Home is in me.