Writing practice: Unknowns

This week I am signed up for a workshop called Explorations of Short Forms, through the Bay Area Writing Project. I don't know how I feel about it yet, which is unusual for me. I typically really, really like something, or I really, really dislike it, but although two days of the workshop have already passed, I'm still unsure as to whether I enjoy it or not. I know I definitely don't enjoy driving to and from Berkeley every day, although this makes me appreciate very much the fact that we stopped looking at houses in Oakland and just moved to the Peninsula.

Anyway, the week is really all about writing practice, or writing invitations, as the teacher calls them. The following is a short piece that came of one writing prompt/practice/invitation.

Unknowns
July 23, 2018

Tell me something I don’t know.
Something that you don’t know is what it feels like to bury your hands deep in hot sand, so that the grains roll over your flesh, warm and soft, until they grow cool and then cold, damp, a perfect juxtaposition to the skin on your still-sweating forearms.

Tell me something you don’t know.
I don’t know where the universe ends or how it began or if it even matters. I don’t know how many stars there are or the number of planets that lie scattered across the vastness of space. I don’t know what a black hole is, or how to measure using light years, or why a belief in god is so often used as justification for hatred and violence rather than the genesis of peace and beauty.

Tell me what nobody knows.
No one knows what kind of person you will be. No one knows what you will look like, what color eyes or hair you’ll have, if you will have skinny, knobby fingers or tiny little elvin points at the uppermost tips of your ears. You are a stranger but also not a stranger, because you live and breathe through me, and maybe you will love books like your mama, or art like your dad, or soccer like your yayo, or knowing all the names of all the plants like your grandma.

Nobody knows the sound of your voice, the strength of your grip, or the trajectory of your heart. Nobody yet knows your name. These are just some of the things that nobody knows.

What do I probably know by now?
By now you know the flavor and the feel of your own tiny thumb. You know the force of your fists and your kicks and the shape of my hands, pressing and probing from without. You probably know the vibrations of my voice and the rhythm of my heart and the rise and fall of my breath, expanding, retracting, always.

What do you really need me to know?
Above all, what I need you to know is that I have never wanted to meet anyone more than I want to meet you, that I will never love anyone the way that I already love you, and that I have never been more afraid of anything as I am that I will be responsible for you.

What I really need you to know is that despite the horrible things that are happening in the world, there is always the capacity for change, for betterment, for goodness. What I need you to know is that you have a responsibility not to be passive.

I need you to know that right now, you are just one tiny person, but already you are the most important one.