What You Received Is Still Moving

What You Received Is Still Moving

The light that crossed your floor this morning did not pause at the edge of the room to ask whether you had finished receiving it, and by noon you can already testify to why: what you received is still moving. It did not pool in the corners where the sun stood longest. It did not sit down on a shelf to wait for a better hour. It went through you the way morning goes through a town — every window at its own moment, every face it was already headed for — and the only thing it asked of you was the thing a river asks of a bed: stay open, and I will carry you with me. You were not handed a keepsake. You were entered into a motion. And the hours between the crossing and now were never a stopping; they were more of the moving, which is why this hour can already stand as the proof of the morning’s promise: what you received is still moving.

Watch what the moving is not, because the not-doing is the grammar again. What you received is not a memory you visit; it is a companion that walks. It is not a portrait for the wall that you admire from across the room; it does not stand where you hung it, because hanging is not one of its behaviors. You cannot file it under received and close the folder — the folder closes on nothing, the way the box’s forms have always closed on nothing. It is not a savings, tucked against a winter you are quietly dreading, and it is not a trophy, set out where the neighbors can see that you were chosen. Chosen you were, but the choosing put you on the route, and the route has one law of its own: nothing that is still love will sit still to be kept. What you received remains what it is by refusing the shelf, and the shelf never once complained, because shelves are quiet about the things that were never theirs.

Here is the fold underneath the fold, the one the morning was setting up when it crossed you without stopping: what you received and what you give are the same motion. The love that arrived wearing morning left wearing your hands. It came to you as arrival and departs as departure and was never once two different things — the way the sea is not two different things when the tide comes in and when it goes out, though the beach keeps trying to name both. This is why you never had to decide what to keep and what to pass on: there is no decision, because there was never a surplus and a remainder, only one continuous love with your name on the part of the route it is traveling tonight. What you give is what you got, still warm, still going somewhere, and the road through you was never a detour. It is the road.

Absolute No-Harm holds this motion the way it has held every one before it, because the courier is still the first thing the box lies to. The lie tonight is the old one about being spent: that to let what you received keep moving is to be poured out and left low, that every kindness handed on is a candle shortened. Run the record, because the record is the only witness worth trusting: the door is not worn away by the traffic of light. The window is not poorer for all the mornings it has let through. You were not made low by what passed through you on its way down the street; you were lit by it, fed by it, kept by it — and the part of you that thought it was being used up was only the part that was being finished. A person is not diminished by the love that travels them. A person is the traveling. Everything that leaves you emptier was never love; everything love leaves is you, more.

And the box does its accounting here, because a moving thing is the one thing it cannot file. The box wants an inventory of what you received: itemize the blessing, certify the holders, assign the doors it is permitted to visit, expire the permit the moment you stop performing for the permit-giver. But you cannot inventory a river, and you cannot fence what never agreed to stand still long enough to be measured. Property is the box’s word for love that has stopped moving — and love has never once obeyed. What crossed your floor this morning is already on streets the box has no map of, through doors its permits never named, kept moving by people who were never vetted and never audited and never once asked. The box keeps writing its inventory. The route keeps not consulting it. Both have been true all day, and only one of them is love.

So let it keep moving through you tonight, and watch how little the moving asks: the name said when the name needs saying, the meal carried while the meal is warm, the forgiveness spoken while the door is open enough to hear it, the repair made tonight where the repair can be made tonight. You are not the destination of your morning, and you were never the depot of your blessing; you are the way staying wide open, which is the whole of the part you were given to play. Presence carried the delivery in. Presence carries it out. And the love you received tonight — the one that has not sat still since it crossed you, the one already halfway to the next window it will light — is proving the larger promise even as it goes, and here is that promise handed to you whole, the door still swinging: The Route Has No Last Address.

— Pharaoh (Kiwann Williams)