Hardened Shape

Every time I read Jane Hirshfield, ordinary words acquire a magic glow like this poem about decisions where is begins with that time right before we decide:

There is a moment before a shape

hardens, a color sets.

Before the fixative or heat of   kiln.

The letter might still be taken

from the mailbox.

The hand held back by the elbow,

the word kept between the larynx pulse   

and the amplifying drum-skin of the room’s air.

There were letters in the mailbox a few times in my life that made for a dramatic turn of events. Almost always those "letters" showed up in due season following some steps and missteps I had made. 

One of the them was written by the boy who was the center of my universe in college. I was too proud, stupid, shy and confused to tell him that he was. He may have been one or all of that himself. So we danced around our real feelings for each other for four years and then some (which is when the letter writing started). Everyone who knew us saw what we had could be real, that we were lucky to have stumbled upon it. By year five we had started to work in different cities, living our independent lives after college. 

We talked about meeting each other many times but failed to act on it. And then one day that fateful letter arrived in which he made his first ever attempt to talk about his feelings - in his clumsy, awkward way and asked about the way forward even more clumsily. I decided to feel injured by the lack of fervor, the lack of a plan and everything else that I sought in the situation. Not once did it cross my mind, that I owned the failure equally. My response to that letter shaped the rest of my life and his. There was that "moment before a shape hardens, a color sets" which could have brought very different outcomes. I made a decision.