The Thing Between Us

I just got back from my book club. We sat around and talked and laughed about husbands and vaginas and breasts and kids and God and disappointment and hope and a fucked up world. And some about the book we read. I don't hang with any slouches. These women are smart and quick, a little fierce and fine edged, and I don't tread the ground there, or the couch I sit on, lightly. The reality is that as hard as I try sometimes to think in full and well-rounded thoughts, that really, I am only able to supply my single line, my thin contribution, and truth - that complex tension of layers between layers - is somewhere stuck inside the collaboration of our lives lived and stories shared. And we pile them all up good and high so that sometimes, most times though not all times, when we are through, looking at our watches and getting text-messaged to come home, there is this thing filling the room that wasn't there before, alive and growing, threaded between us all, fragrant and unfurling. And maybe the smell of it wakes me up a little, turns me a degree to the right when I had been leaning left, brings me a sweater and hands me a shovel or a mirror or a glass of wine to drink at the end of a long day. What I need. What I hadn't seen before. I don't know. It's something. The way it appears and grows up between us all. As if it were planted. As if it were magic.