Gape

My tongue keeps finding the gap.

Three days before I leave the country, I went to the nicest dentist in San Francisco to replace a damaged crown on my front tooth. But the crown came back from the lab too small, a shade too pale, and a little angled. Because it is narrower than the tooth it replaced, there is a sliver of space on either side. And because I leave for Berlin tomorrow, there is no time to fix it now.

My tongue goes to it a hundred times a day. Fake. Temporary. Off. For the next seventy-seven days, this is the tooth I wear out of California.

The dentist took it harder than I did. She is a Capricorn and a perfectionist, which is who you want rebuilding the front of your face. She is done with that lab. She will order another crown. It will not be ready until I am long gone.

So I gave her the only spin available: this will be good for me. One of the first things anyone sees, slightly wrong, and nothing to do but smile or don't.

I wanted to leave finished. House sold, company steady, boys settled, bags packed, the whole life tied off clean. I even wanted the tooth. Instead I got a crooked crown and a month coming apart in my hands.

I wanted order before I left. I got chaos. So the practice became surrender.

You learn surrender on the small things first.

Mine was a missed deadline. I did not publish on the last full moon. The Change runs on the moon, new and full, every two weeks, ready or not, and on May 31 I had a customer going live, a house to pack, boxes everywhere, and two kids to feed. I let the moon pass over me unwritten.

(It was a blue moon, as it happened. The second full moon that month, the rare extra one. So, for the record, I now miss deadlines exactly once in a blue moon.)

Under the joke is the thing I did not want to admit: the moon keeps every appointment and I do not. I cannot show up faithful and exact and immune to packing tape. I am not a celestial body. And a project called the Change that cannot bend when a life bends was never about change. It was about me wanting to look consistent.

Chaos. I have been using the word the way everyone does, as an accusation. Your room is chaos. The airport is chaos. The country is chaos. We mean something broke.

But the word is older than that, and it did not start as a mess. It comes through Greek from khaos, a gap, a gaping, the open mouth of the void before anything had a name. The Greeks had other words for disorder, but chaos was the opening. The yawn before form.

A gape.

Like the one on either side of my tooth. Like the one I am about to walk into.

That is the honest name for this month. Nothing broke. The old shape stopped holding. There was too much at once, which is its own kind of weather. You cannot hold your attention anywhere long enough to do it well, so you do everything partly. I kept the company alive instead of building it. I got food into the boys instead of fathering them the way I do when there is room. I gave away the garden tools I once bought for a house I have now sold. Yoga went. Exercise went. Good food went. Unhurried goodbyes went. A cut here, a cut there, all month, like tending a bonsai tree. Whatever I had to do just to keep the plates spinning.

I hate working like this, because I love mastery. The clean plan. The bag packed so well it closes on the first try. This season let me master nothing, then asked me to leave anyway.

I am trying to learn the difference between letting go and avoiding.

Letting go of what was never mine to hold is sacred. Avoidance is a similar shrug, but pointed at what is truly my responsibility to act upon.

One is loosening my grip on time and weather and other people. The other is knowing exactly where order is mine to bring, the phone call, the bill, the kid in the doorway, and not bringing it, then glibly calling the gap "flow."

I am not always sure which one I am acting out. I have sold myself the wrong one before.

What I know is that surrender is not the same as collapse. Collapse requires spending your last reserve holding onto control that you never had. Surrender happens earlier. On purpose. It notices you are burning your life energy resisting something already true, and it wants the fuel back.

So I stopped fighting this season. I surrendered to it.

For now, I bring order only where the order is mine to bring.

The rest I let gape open.

People may think I am leaving because California stopped being enough, or because I was not enough for California.

Neither is true. I am still deeply in love with the place and all it represents: the right song in the car, the windows rolled down so the sun hits your skin, the salt water within reach, something beautiful an hour away if traffic cooperates, the unique permission to make everything up as you go (which I am very much taking with me).

Leaving is not a judgment on the place. The trouble is only that my mind has already left.

For weeks I have been moving through California in my body while some other part of me keeps arranging a room in Berlin I have never seen and planning for a life I do not yet know. I know that is not presence, but there is no trick for closing that distance. It just is.

My essential possessions now fit in one 45L olive green backpack, from my laptop down to a beat-up seventies copy of Where the Sidewalk Ends I bought my sons in Ojai. The bag represents everything in one object. You can move through the world with almost nothing and have everything you need. No, you cannot outfit a whole life inside it. But with it, you can belong anywhere, and become the person you need to become there.

I know which song just came on, and which window is open. Now I just have to let the light in.

Berlin is gaping open on the other side of the ocean. Unfinished, half-dark, nothing tied off, waiting.

Today, June 14, the new moon shows nothing. It is not full, not bright, not worth a photograph. That is the whole point. It is dark. The gap before the next thing takes shape.

The old word for that is chaos.

It was never the insult we made it.

I am not ready.

I am going anyway.