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Photographer: Paige Six

I’ve waited quite literally a lifetime to settle into the type of love which brings the terms settling to a distinctly new definition. I love my husband the way I love to run barefoot through grass. I love my husband the way I love to find shapes in clouds.

So when he came home yesterday telling me he needs more tests, that his back may be giving out not due to the degeneration of his discs which the VA insists is not a service related disfigurement, but because there may be a growth on his spine, well it felt fitting that the bright side of his diagnosis rests on the chance that the signs of a growth may be only a shadow.

For reasons I will not disclose in this portion of my writings: I feel like Faust. How beautiful it is to feel the skin of a lover who embraces you so whole, gentle on the blade of his fingers my cheeks, wisps of baby hairs, and the gentle swell of grey hairs spreading across our hairlines. How heartbreaking it is to put the plans to buy a home on hold because treatments cost so much money, and money doesn’t grow on trees nor has a history of populating my pockets for too long.

We used to sing together in his silver Elantra “it just takes some time…”, but the closer I get to whatever remains of my life the more I understand how time only takes. Every break I take risks breaking me as well as it can rejuvenate my body and mind. The fine line between resting and rusting, how I’ve made a living of walking its tight rope. And the bygones kept floating by.

We still sing together, more than ever. Only it’s in our white Buick. My only regret is that we didn’t realize that this was the best life could be. We went our separate ways for so long, and now we have no idea what’s left. It’s such a bittersweet kind of dream life.

Paige Six | 10.07.20

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Emotional Alchemy Issue. No. 1

Being chosen for print has always been an object of my desire. I have always wanted to have my work accepted, appreciated, and loved. But what is this driving force that keeps me sharing my words rather than locking them in my armoire to be discovered upon my death like Emily Dickinson?

Jacques Lacan coined the phrase ‘objet petit a’. What he meant to accomplish was noble in my opinion: was to put a neat bow around the emotion surrounding an unattainable object of desire. Was to give humanity a phrase in which we could communicate and relate to one another through our unique shrouds of longing.

I particularly love the use of small. tiny. petite: ‘objet petit a’. Because it feels small, doesn’t it? Even though it inspires our bigger calls to action

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Would you call it an echo? Or perhaps just a ringing? Picture a soft Doppler Effect: a subtle vibration that flows in waves, a pattern that we can follow until the next soundwave disrupts the flow changing our driving direction towards something new and more colorful? Hubble might have said so had he not had so many more important realities to tackle.

Is it to pine for an unspecified, and perhaps abstract moment in the future? A greatness? Or maybe to long for it to rectify the regrets that haunt our past without consequences of regression? A reunion?

It is a ghost that hasn’t passed away yet haunting us, speaking through code upon a ouija board and we simply will not say good bye? Maybe it did die and we’re arrested in the denial stage.

In my time postulating how to put this phrase, ‘objet petit a’ into poetry I have come to some conclusion as to what it means to me, currently, or in the past, as to you are most definitely reading it as it was in mine:

Imagine a mote, a spec of dust, neglected maybe, inside of us that we cannot pinpoint, something too small to see without a microscope. Yet it is powerful. The quantum quandary that allows for the tiniest pieces to hold the greatest potential force. An atomic explosion resulting from hadron collision. A Big Bang. An accelerated particle in all of us that was dormant for far too long.

It’s not missing, I think, even though we search for it, chase it, dream on it. No, I believe this ‘objet petit a’ takes on the abstract shape of an unfillable void. a pocket with an endless hole. While one small spec may light its dark tiny spaces for a while, its insatiable longing pulls us towards the next object of our human appetites.

And it makes us great. It makes us better. It makes humanity, when working towards a cohesive goal more whole. I am proud to be a part of something that made the world more beautiful and kind, even if it is not my final destination…

Paige Six | 3.20.20