The third hand in the dark

which kneads the evasive substance, and nudges it this way and that.

What am I passing through? Surely myself, an ouroboric conduit, a passage extending endlessly into itself.

I wrote to my former poetry professor. It has been five years since I’ve seen him. I burst into tears upon his reply. To think a part of me is still such a fragile, child-like thing, walking desperately behind my mother in the train station, her never turning back once. I’ve had to understand, these last months, that I am not someone to run away from. Whether I like myself or not is nearly secondary — what matters is that I want to live.

I also met up with my former poetry mentor, who advised me with a gentle, paternal air. And my father, my brother, my partner — strangely, I am learning from them a more masculine approach to my life. Somehow, it gives my fire better guidance than my diaphanous nature can. It simplifies my grand, impossible visions into a daily, liveable repetition. Taking care of each day, I begin to live a whole life.

I used to type as an Enneagram Four — someone engrossed in the question: Who am I and what is my purpose? Now I type as a One, asking, How can I live well, with integrity and honour? I have tired of the question of identity and selfhood. I trust, now, my decisions (and their attendant consequences) to reveal a recognizable shape over time.

From moment to moment, what I attempt to solve is merely, What feels true and aligned with my values? How will I choose to act? With each consequence — information, feedback, signal — I sharpen my metric. I realign to that illegible core, which in the end must be intuited. Any articulation in words is only a brief transmutation, to bring the material into consciousness for narrative purposes, before it is subsumed again. Yet I must hone the third hand in the dark, which kneads the evasive substance, and nudges it this way and that.

It is true, as a friend said to me, that I am closer to myself than I’ve been since we met in late 2020. This recovery period has been a genuine retreat — a withdrawal into the self. I discovered how little of a home I’ve been to me, the spirit constantly in flight from the flesh. How muddied the mind with messages and media. Missing my own dispatches entirely, despite my body and mind’s best tries.

I hardly know what’s next, though I have an inkling. I know it will be different, for I live newly. For I know love is inside myself, and I belong in the world.