For tomorrow

Wistful is the word for today.
The flavour is nectarine, stringy and threatening to stay stuck in your teeth, the bitter hard rough experience of the seed almost as much fun for your tongue as the sweet flesh.
The pain for the day is the strange cut you got while cleaning up – made from a piece of synthetic thread you tried to break by pulling with your crooked finger, but it bit in hard and the very thin white line of shock has now opened and made a red pink swollen area of hurt.
The smell for the day is coffee, every time you go into the kitchen and your pavlovian response – coffee! Make me coffee!
The image of the day is the cleaned benches at home and at work after you got busy with the dishcloth and made expanses of surfaces, lush plate of fruit sitting in a gleaning ice floe of varnished table.
The surprise anger for the day is raging, irritable, beesting ouch of fury that comes up at the bust stop when you rethink something someone said to you yesterday. You marvel that the ‘anger’ phase of your grieving process has come so slowly, last year sadness, great big gulping tears that felt like drowning and now, this fury, this indignation, this arguing the umpire’s call. Your most recent book on the topic tells you that this is normal, that the anger at mistreatment needs to come before you realize that you deserve to be treated better. Before then there is a thousand tales of apology, of accommodation, of understanding, of forgiveness. But repressed hurt needs to come out, splinter and pus-like, before a wound can be cleaned and healed over.
The feeling of today is listless – going slower, feeling like kelp drifting slow in a dark green world where everything comes a beat later than when it started – a gel-like thickness to the water, to my movement through it. I am mermaid with ears full of ocean silence and the squeals of fishes, the electro-pulse of submerged military secrets, my arms green and distorted at the ends, my hands fan out in the far distance darker then here. I am mouthfuls of salt burn and sweet fish spawn and rubbery bite of the sea bubbles I wear strung around like pearls. Almost ironically. Almost ironically.
The achievement of today is yet to come. Surprise me blank page and pencil, write something useful. Do something. Engage in the tasks that float by. Make a stand. Make a paragraph. Make a wave, make a ripple, make a molehill out of a mountain, make something interesting. Make a difference. Make a list, make a call, make a decisive action. Make some urgency out of all the slow. Fast as I can. Fast as you can.
The look of today is ironed, matching, layers, all weather.