In the seventh entry of Pam Houston’s book, “Contents May Have Shifted,” a fisherman tells the speaker that “we’ve been put on earth to crack each other open” (15).
Are we? Have you felt cracked open? Have you been the one cracking someone else? Did you stick around or bolt? What did it feel like?
If you haven’t, do you want to be? Cracked open, that is.
I have been—many times—and I want to be again. And again. It seems like the thing that should be happening with all this living, it’s the only thing that makes sense, the only way I can look at all the pain that’s happened and all that is to come and say okay, welcome.
Perhaps it’s selfish, thinking that everything relates back to me / everything is about what can crack me open.
I like the image, and onomatopoeia, of it. All the ways we build up a self, a narrative—some sort of cohesion— and how the world has to remind you you’re not that.
I’ve been cracked open as many times, if not more, by the natural world as I have by humans.
Some:
One time walking in the dust in New Mexico, another driving home from therapy on the Vermont highway, once on a beach in Massachusetts with the man who had been the love of my life. Another on a long run in January, surrounded by snow-crusted cacti— though I don’t know if it was the landscape or my thoughts that did the cracking / perhaps it was both. One happened as I faced a standing ovation in high school. Once on a ranch, in a rainstorm. Years later, backpacking in North Carolina, in the middle of a meditation. Another time throwing the bright pink pills in the creek / finding one in the sand / throwing it even farther.
Sometimes I wonder if I’m in the middle of cracking myself. There are times when I feel I’ve reached some precipice, where I have let go of all the ways I ask others to make me happy and suddenly have to turn inward / see what’s there. And what’s there sometimes is not enough—yet. It will be once I crack open and let it spill / more and more / into and out of myself.
Thoughts / prompts:
Name someone who has cracked you open. Tell the story.
Do you think they know they cracked you open?
Draw a map of places that cracked you open.