thankful

Lately, words have not been scarce for me.

I have been surrounded by fellowships, projects, assignments. I've been making time for stories and poems. My days are filled with words, discussing papers, ideas, with new friends, new mentors.

I am so thankful for these words, these people, this life. There aren't enough words to encompass how thankful I am.

Here's a glimpse of something I am oh so thankful for.



reading in jammies from rachael bloom on Vimeo.



This person. This person forever and ever and ever and ever. Not enough words, not enough love.

(those cheeks! those eyes! look at the love of my life!)

quick draft

after a fire

first to return: the ones who do not need anyone else.
the mosses, the lichens
able to cling to the rocks. to stand the loneliness.
after a heartbreak: the ability to get out of bed in the morning
to place one foot in front of another.
both serve the same purpose:
to break the rocks into manageable pieces,
soil for the grasses. to change the day
into something recognizable again.

this is how we heal, after a fire, a devastation:
slowly. dependent so much at first on the wind
to blow seeds of what once was over this bare earth.

then the green returns. scientists call this new growth,
this gross injustice of having to build something up
that was already there.

i want to quantify all of this. let me reduce
the world to the bare minimum, and bring it up again.

let me reconstitute this love story.
let me map this heartbreak.

here are the constants: your presence, the rain,
our love, turned variables. a drought. the unknowns:
the lightning, when the tenses started to change.

the one i love, the one i loved.
the ground wet, then dry.

to the student looking for answers:

not every forest fire has an arsonist
you cannot fault the lightning for striking
the fire for wanting to burn
not every heartbreak has a destroyer
no one teaches the heart how to love,
how to be loved. you cannot fault the heart
for breaking on its own.

and yet i want to quantify everything:
the scientist after a fire. loyal only to her senses,
to what she sees, what she can touch.

here are when the mosses start to emerge
here the first grasses, here the blooms returned,
the birds to the trees, the fox to her den.
the farther from the fire we get, new questions:
how strong must the wind be to shake new leaves from trees?
how many years until you stop haunting my dreams?

in dreams

I have these really intense dreams about whatever I've been thinking about most during the day. A few weeks ago I was dreaming of sets and dictionaries and keys. (computer science) and last night I dreamed about gene regulatory networks and monty python.

I was supposed to be reading this paper “Bifurcation dynamics in lineage-commitment in bipotent progenitor cells”, but really I've just been thinking about reading this paper. I also found this text processing program that works in Python, and all the examples are with Monty Python quotes; so I dreamed, last night that I was drawing a diagram for the bifurcation of the knights who say “Ni” to the knights who say Ekki-Ekki-Ekki-Ekki-PTANG. Zoom-Boing. Z'nourrwringmm.

Gosh I need to get back to work. But I was thinking, oh man, I could draw a gene regulatory network to figure out the transcription factors that are in charge of determining whether the knights say "Ni" or that whole other thing. 

I woke up out of this dream having to go to the bathroom, because hydration! And then I couldn't get back to sleep because I was really pissed off at myself because this is not a bifurcation network, rachael's dream state. It's jut a run of the mill development diagram. 

references:

Huang, S., et al. (2007). Bifurcation dynamics in lineage-commitment in bipotent progenitor cells. Dev Biol. 305: 695-713.

TextBlob: simplified text processing. https://textblob.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

enough

I love my daughter so much it actually hurts sometimes. My breath gets caught in my chest, and I have to gasp to free it. Or there is this ache in my heart, as if each beat is a sound wave, an extension of a hand, trying to find her. I need to be near her, I need to know she's ok.

But when she is around I'm busy. Or worried about something. So distracted and annoyed by her. I had the outrageous thought the other day: I put her on the bus and I promised myself that I would be an awesome grandmother. A grandmother! I'm twenty-six years old and I'm already thinking, 'Oh well, I've fucked it up already, I'll do better next generation.' What is wrong with you, Rachael? What is wrong with doing better today? Pull it together, Bloom. And there it is. That aching thump. Where is she. Is she okay. Where is my love, my life, my heart and soul.

I go back and forth on what's best for me and what's best for her and what's best for both of us. Science right now is so much fun. It's what gets me up in the mornings. But it also distracts me, pulls me away. Science is a beast that makes me annoyed if others plead for attention. And on these days I just need to say to myself, right now, it is enough that your heart beats for her. It is enough, this ocean of love beneath the 'not now's, the 'in a minute's, the 'please just go to your room's. And I just have to trust that these days the good-and-bad days, or just the bad days, that my aching heart finds Lena's in the dark, and she knows that I love her.

On these days, this has to be enough. This has to be enough. This is my mantra as my body gives in to exhaustion, as the tiniest hiccup moves me to tears. When the timbre of the world sends me to bed early with the covers pulled up over my head, I have to trust that my love is enough. My heart aching is enough. Love is enough. Love is enough. Today baby, love is enough.