A hiatus is not the same as a haiku. There may or may not be nature involved in hiatus. Similarly, there may or may not be a written record, letters, like footprints across the page to memorialize the passage of time through experience. There is no meter in hiatus. Things happen or not in a disorganized stream of existence. If there was no written record, did life even happen?
A pause. A gap in sequence or series. Was there a pause on my life? Surely on my inner life. Things happened. Life changes. I held my breath, held my thoughts, held my heart, and stepped gingerly forward through time and experience. I felt the words scratching and pawing on the inside of my skull, “Let us out…” They begged. But no. I would not. I was still holding my breath.
I have become a free diver at last. I can in fact, take a hiatus from life while still swimming through the world. I pass through the warm and the bright, the cold and the dark, the murky liminal in-betweens. I transform through the passage, but only in the typical temporal ways; hair, job title, clothes, jewelry. The people around me go and come. The seasons do the same.
I have a crown of flowers from last spring still decorating my lamp. They’re from before the hiatus. Now the vernal equinox approaches. There are new flowers growing.
So now.
Perhaps.
Now.
I will
Exhale.