dislocation

Everyone has those days, when from the moment your feet hit the floor you are following yourself around, trying to get back into your skin. One of those days when you desparately need to shut yourself into a room and sleep, pray, start over, but there's laundry to wash and birthday parties to attend. It makes no sense why it happens, why your every frustration and bad feeling comes to a head on one single day and your husband follows your frown around the house asking, "What's the matter? Why are you acting like this?" And you just want to shout, "Help! I can't find myself today." But you prefer to slam the dishes in the washer, smile politely and mutter, "I'm fine."

It's nothing short of God's grace that the next morning you find yourself nicely zipped back up in the skin that's familiar, a genuine smile blossoming from your heart as if yesterday was just a strange, foggy dream. When you wake and find yourself, you sigh with gratitude, you get on your knees and pray for forgiveness, and you hope that no one caught you on film.

Dislocation
by Marge Piercy

It happens in an instant.
My grandma used to say
someone is walking on your grave.

It's that moment when your life
is suddenly strange to you
as someone else's coat

you have slipped on at a party
by accident, and it is far
too big or too tight for you.

Your life feels awkward, ill
fitting. You remember why you
came into this kitchen, but you

feel you don't belong here.
It scares you in a remote
numb way. You fear that you—

whatever you means, this mind,
this entity stuck into a name
like mercury dropped into water—

have lost the ability to enter your
self, a key that no longer works.
Perhaps you will be locked

out here forever peering in
at your body, if that self is really
what you are. If you are at all.