By A.S. Aubrey
This morning, I sit safe in my office in the darkened day, sun still, not yet rising, safe from client questions, the pain of being human. But I both long for and resist this calling: how deep it digs me into the flesh of this bright and bumbling life, descending and rising, breathing shared breath.
I think, sometimes how strange, to have an hour to solve the problems of the soul. But then, this isn’t solving exactly, but more a shared holding of the impossible. We find each other out here.
I do not fully understand this, only need it just as much as you, my breathing shared with yours. Once the walls of this space were not so needed; maybe the world was friendlier, a collective hug for all that ails, communities of heart or deeper help. Or maybe this is myth, and we have always struggled and learned to bear it: from the earliest terror of animal-eaten flash, to our modern meaningless meanderings, the stress of traffic and online likes. Feeling the dark beat down as shadow, that sense of being lost to ourselves.
There is magic in this hour, and yet it seems such a small dose with which to inhabit ourselves, when the world yields everything to us without stopping. How to carve the quiet place, its shaky walls becoming stronger with repetition until you know your own home? This is the work and play of meeting you here, in the dark diamond underground of exploring your life. Will you discover yourself?
To know that nothing was wasted–not these drops of time together. Knowing that patience, peering into that dark and underground cave, lets the long buried breathe again, a bright-glistening rock transformed by pressure, finally carrying its own light. Your light, also letting me see.
A.S. Aubrey is a psychotherapist/writer working with trauma, chronic illness and identity. Her work has been seen or is forthcoming in The Poets Corner’s Art & Ekphrastic Poetry exhibit, Cathexis Northwest Press, Journal X, Hare’s Paw, Voices/1922 Review, The Bookends Review, and Querencia Press. She was long-listed for the Westword Prize 2025 and is short-listed for the Clarissa Dalloway 2025 Prose Prize. Her poetry chapbook ‘Hide & Seek’ is forthcoming by Finishing Line Press. She currently lives in Los Angeles, where the urban sprawl inspires humor and existential angst.
losing our grip on purpose 