and leave no trail

In case it’s somehow not super-obvious yet: I’m not a gentle person. I slam doors. I drop things. I thump down the stairs like an elephant; I blurt stuff and then immediately regret it. I do not always understand or appreciate the impact of my own self in space.

It’s part of why I’m so clumsy, probably: “Think about your steps,” my dad told me once, after I’d wiped out in the middle of one sidewalk or another, bruises on my shins or the palms of my hands. “Just move more slowly, and think.”

I try to, I told him. I just forget. 

This weekend, I messed up. It doesn’t matter how, but I acted like a bull in a damn china shop, and with a carelessness that is sort of breathtaking to me when I remember it now, I broke a thing that, for various reasons, I can’t fix.

I didn’t think about my steps, and I fell.

I’ve been trying to figure out what I want to write about turning thirty. I’ve been trying to figure out exactly what I want to do. In the past I’ve made long lists of goals and plans and visions but this decade I think I just want to live in the world more carefully. I want to leave a little less destruction in my wake.