Coyotes
My son has trouble prioritizing causality when he speaks. “It’s raining because we can’t go outside,” he says. Other times there is not cause or effect but an anticipation of design not required to fulfill his demands. “The refrigerator is cold in there because I want the milk.” These statements are confusing but poetic in their pseudo-Buddhist way. I don’t relish in calling out the profundity of my child’s semiotics. I constantly worry that bragging about his peculiarities makes me seem delusional. I’m half-waiting for someone to say to me “he’s got some kind of learning disorder, sis.” Conversely, I don’t need to be telling this anecdote like some hacky TEDtalk allegory on how to reorganize our brains in ways no one asked. My son’s utterances simply make me question the order of my own feelings.
Is it that I want to howl, or that I am a coyote? Should the piecemeal of sentence fragments ever represent the thought-feelings that explode in my nebulous body and bound toward hallucinated sounds of your voice narrating those explosions, words would be responsible for the cardiac event everybody warned us about. Eat fiber, drink water, exercise, rest. And every other part of the corpus, the constellation, the galaxy, can wait its turn to be named.
