Settle
I’m on set, in charge of making sure all the words I’ve written came out in order from an influencer’s mouth. The videographer calls out “settle” and all the butterflies in my body startle from their resting places. They bump into the sides of me. Settle. Settle, I whisper. I focus all my attention on set, noting if a word drops, if a sound overlaps, if the bottle faces camera, if her hair falls over her eyes, if a plane is flying too low. I tell my foot to stop bouncing. And I succeed in giving my butterflies only a fraction of my attention for now. Promising them we’ll play soon. Feeding them all the extra details that don’t require me to ask her to run it from the top. I’ve been practicing this my whole life.
When I was 5 I was in tap class, somewhere on the half shuttered Main Street of Whitinsville. A dance studio in a forgotten mill town. We’d sit up against the wall while our teacher showed us the next steps, shuffle ball change. Her feet emphasizing how easy this could be. Her loud r-less accent, deep seething annoyance crawling up the edge of every word. Like one more ‘shuffle ball change’ and this woman was going to burst into flames inside her skin. But I couldn’t settle and when I was young I didn’t know how to keep my eyes off all the butterflies. I remember my steps but not as clearly as I remember her hands clapping in front of my face WAKE UP SARAH! PAY ATTENTION. I was. That’s the thing about my brain. I was paying attention. To inner and outside. To her disdainful shuffle ball change and how the linoleum was peeling and the overhead light was buzzing and flickering in time to a song I was starting to make up in my head.
I am paying attention to you, me, where that glass should be, a breeze whisking the sun off my arm and coaxing it to lay back down, a train far away, a black cat with one white paw in a third story window, the lilt at the end of her sentence, skeletons of last years leaves, cinnamon and warm yeast, a snapshot of a turn in a road I drove once. I’m alert all day. Details are sabertooth tigers. I don’t turn my back on a single one. And I sleep hard.
Settle, he says.
I can feel it in all the thoughtful tones. Sarah, what we like about you is…but whatever comes next, “you’re energetic” “you’re exciting” I know it’s not what they like about me, it’s what they wish they could find the spigot for. So they could turn it down. Just enough. Just to where I could settle.