in medias res; in meatiest race; calm.

There are always circumstances. You can count on that. What you cannot count on is your own response to those circumstances. It could go any which way, really.


Meat Space #1 is an oasis of chocolate earth and damp green canopy in the middle of a busy boulevard. it would be easy, too easy, for me to think I can't be myself, standing there, exposed. Easy to think I can't breathe in there, expose my quietly humming insides to that circumstantial whoosh and whirr. But then... it's ordinary. I have to do it every day. And I'm not special in this; you do too. You do it probably so well you don't even notice you're doing it.


'in medias res.' Aristotle. Theatre. I remember from freshman year of high school. We enter the drama smack in the middle of things, not with some preamble. When the play starts, it's already going. That's how the quiet is in the middle of meat space #1. It doesn't begin just because I've arrived; it was already going. 


Who started it? I look around, seemingly alone.


But above me is the green, humid, layer-cake-thick canopy magnolia and tulip have generated from their own blood, sweat and tears or the tree versions thereof; and below me is that chocolate earth, a criss-cross of ant traffic and petal smash. Who in me thought I was alone here goes quiet to reveal who in me knows I wasn't.


Here's another thing. When I step out, I become so superior to my own experience. I look at it from the outside; I see it shrink, feel it drop into my pocket, feel it jangle with me to my car where I will take diminutive notes, like an anthropoligist after the field closes  behind her. But looking back at those notes, I am wiser than that trick of the academic. I remain lost in the middle of things, and I find myself accompanied by the quiet I walked away from but which hasn't walked away from me.