COME BACK

capable / renewed / with me / with you

this past week i got to spend some days with some dear (DEAR!) friends in north carolina, in the house where one of them grew up. the house, by the way, has a sign in the kitchen that says MAKE LOVE OBVIOUS.

my friends, L & G, are the type of people who make me feel capable and renewed. they make me feel like some unseen benevolent force out there—by bringing them to keep company and counsel with me—cares about me wants me to win.

so you see, saying goodbye to them is very difficult. though i know we’ll be together again, and though they are with me always in spirit.

so there i was, sitting in the greensboro airport on saturday morning, a bit bereft.

right on time came this edition of Common Discourse - Sights & Sounds: Camille Bacon, in which she writes about Toni Morrison’s friendship with Lucille Clifton, and a parting of theirs.!

not long after meeting Clifton, after time spent together, Morrison wrote to her: “I wish we had more time—I had just discovered what it was when the time was gone. Come back.” COME BACK, which is how i felt too, sitting there in the terminal and on the plane.

grateful and kind of raw, present at once to the fleeting and the eternal. “my heart is not peripheral to me” is a June Jordan line Bacon also includes. but isn’t it? it lives in other people. it lives in you.