interstice
essay for speaking aloud
I want to talk about the parts of the body that go unnamed.
The ones between landmarks.
The ones you feel before you can place them.
Not the hip, not the thigh—
but the space between them that registers weight
before you’ve even shifted.
It’s not always about function.
Sometimes it’s just a place that holds pressure
or carries something through
or flickers.
I’ve been paying more attention to those lately.
There are feelings like that too.
Ones that arrive without form.
Ones that stay under language.
Ones that don’t want to be shaped into clarity,
because they’re already doing something.
They move around the edges of whatever I’m supposed to be doing.
They interrupt.
They linger.
They show up in the middle of a sentence
and stall it.
I grew up in a place where the trees lean west.
They grow that way—
because that’s where the weather usually comes from.
You can see it in their trunks, in the weight of them.
They’ve grown used to being pressed from one side.
Then one year, the wind came from the south.
It dropped fast, over the mountains,
into the lowlands.
Trees cracked,
or came out at the roots.
Not a fall—
more like a slow shifting up and out.
Things came undone, but without collapse.
I walked the next morning up near the Fine Arts Center.
There’s a stone labyrinth there, with a tree in the middle.
It had lifted.
Roots fully out of the ground, wide and soaked.
The shape of it threw everything off.
It didn’t look broken.
Just… relocated.
I keep thinking about that tree.
About the way something can seem stable for years—decades—
and then a force from a new direction
moves through,
and the hold is different.
The whole orientation shifts.
There are days I don’t know where I’m speaking from.
Like the words are coming through the body,
but from a part of it I haven’t named yet.
A place below intention.
There’s still direction.
There’s still choice.
But it’s slower.
Slanted.
Like something inside is listening first,
before answering.
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to stay close to
a feeling that started early,
before I had language for it.
Something that made sense in the body
without explanation.
A kind of devotion that didn’t ask to be explained.
And when that feeling changes—
when it shows up differently,
when it moves through a different part of me—
I don’t always recognize it at first.
It takes time.
It doesn’t announce itself.
It interrupts.
There’s no clean entry point into this.
No conclusion.
I just keep returning
to this idea
that what matters
is happening
in the space between things.
Between two named parts of the body.
Between recognition and speech.
Between gesture and follow-through.
The shift isn’t always dramatic.
Sometimes it’s just the weight
of standing differently
in a place you thought you already knew.
