How To Fight

Let me tell you how to fight.

It's not the way I was taught: tough lady pushing or pleading with words, sometimes sharp like daggers, and slammed by a fist or the flat iron back of a hand nearly as big as her head.

Not that way.

Not the way I did as a child either, screaming all the right words inside my head fierce as beach wind but only shaped by it on the inside -- a thousand steep dunes with cryptic passage to the sea.

Not like my father who shreds those around him without realizing that he is always right behind each, bearing the scars he has left on one and all.

Let me tell you, it is much softer than all that, and still it is deeper and darker than I ever thought possible.

This is how you fight: you listen. You crack yourself open and you let the other come rushing in until you know how they taste, how they smell, how they move in the world. You open your pores until the other seeps into you and you can feel how they feel because they are not outside and other at all.

You soften because all those holes leave you open and full at the same time, moving, jitterbugging with the electricity of connection.

And then you can speak, and when you speak, your words don't belong to you anymore. They are words of love, because it is love to listen like that. And you speak from deep down where you broke yourself open. You speak from that brokenness and there is a chance you will be heard from that place because words from down there, they echo. They sound different like a song in a narrow red canyon, and that music is rare and demands an ear.

But sometimes not. Sometimes the walls just shake all around and there is no ear, and that is no time to stop trying.

That is no time to be silent.

Into that canyon, you pull the ear, you bend it and teach it how to listen, how to crack itself open. You sing into it so it cannot resist, and the more that fight means to you, the softer you sing. How can you resist me?

I have you in me now, and you may be right or you may dance with me here.

Being right is lonely.

Being right does not echo or shine or even break through walls. Being right is a dull thud in our favor, and we want more, by nature we want more.

We have to fight for it.