A Well Staring at the Sky: A Magnet

Read Part 13: A Death Foretold — Part 6

It’s my second month in San Francisco and I am still unsure of myself in this new place. I miss the familiarity of Texas and understanding the culture around me. I feel lost in my thoughts and I am physically lost most of the time as I roam the city.

I spend about an hour on the phone each day talking to her. I tell her the same fears and concerns over and over again and she listens with patience. She tells me to acknowledge my worries and concerns. She says not to be so hard on myself and that this will all sort itself out with time. She asks me for my address.

In the middle of January, she sends me a heavy card. When I open it the card is a black and white photo of a man walking along a road into the distance. A quote by Anaïs Nin underneath the photo reads: “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”

When I open the card there is a large, square refrigerator magnet. Printed on it is a quote from Rilke’s ‘Letters to a Young Poet’,

“You are so young, you have not even begun, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that is unsolved in your heart and to try to cherish the questions themselves, like closed rooms and like books written in a very strange tongue. Do not search now for the answers which cannot be given you because you could not live them. It is a matter of living everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, live right into the answer.”

Read Part 15: A Death Foretold — Part 7