I come from a family of engineers,
And while I go to art school,
There is still evidence,
Of my upbringing.
I count everything.
The number of steps in a staircase,
Or strides between cracks in the sidewalks,
Heartbeats in a second,
And breaths in a minute.
When I am anxious,
I will quickly count to ten,
And then back down.
Astride a horse,
Cantering to the next fence,
I count to keep a steady rhythm,
So I know where I am,
And how many strides it is
Until the jump.
At night,
I calculate how many hours I have
Until I need to wake up,
Deciding how many more episodes
Of bad tv I can watch
And still get enough sleep
Or make plans
To get a cup of coffee in the morning.
I count meaningless things, too,
Like the number of black cars I see,
On my way to class,
Or the amount of times,
I think about
Things that no longer matter,
Such as the number of days
It has been
Since we last talked,
Or how long it has been
Since I figured out
How to do things on my own.
Each second of the silence,
Is carefully calculated,
No variable left unsolved.
And like the engineers I come from,
I come up with a logical answer
As to what happened
To cause the silence.
But nowhere in my math,
Can I find
A viable solution
To fix the silence.
So I sit with my pencil and calculator,
Recounting everything that happened,
Thinking that maybe I missed something,
Trying new equations
And different numbers.
But the results end up the same.
I realize that maybe,
This is a problem
Not even Einstein could solve,
And instead of wasting more time,
Counting the things that don’t matter,
I should erase everything,
Throw the scribbled equations into the trash,
And start counting
The things that really matter.
Rachelle Manning 