I’m not exactly sure how it happens, I’m just sure that it does. One minute it’s a May evening, the green leaves are dancing above me, teasing me with the sky’s blue and white secrets. The river turns over and over, heading to wherever it’s going. The breeze perfumes the air with the smell of lilac, fresh cut grass and that earth smell of wet, humid soil. That dark soil from the bottom of the river, that after deep winter sleeps and deep winter thaws, shipwrecks and vacations amongst grassy spots. Dark soil that shades your feet and leaves lines in your bathtub. It’s 75 degrees. It’s 75 degrees in May and then at the drop of an eyelid, it’s -14 and snow is stacked as high as you can see. The wind cuts through me and an unfamiliar river is frozen over, tricking me into thinking it’s just more solid land, tricking me into thinking life can stay one way for ever. It’s January the 24th and I’m watching them drive you away in a long white car that I never want to see again. Well, unless that white car drives you back saying this has all been a terrible, terrible mistake. A bad joke, if you will. That white car though, it drove straight until I couldn’t see it any more and then I don’t know if it turned left twice and right three times, I just know that it never drove you back to me.

I close my eyes a little tighter. And it’s May again, only it’s May, three years ago and I feel your hands in my curls and my head rests in your lap and I see your dirty feet marked by dark soil and there isn’t anything around for miles that I’d rather start at. It’s just you, me and those dirty feet. You whisper that I was your greatest birthday gift to date. My birthday is months away, but I think seeing your face would be a grand gift too, but how do you go about putting a “you” on a birthday wish list? I push that December birthday out of my mind. I’m not thinking about tomorrows. That May there were only today’s and there sure weren’t enough of them.

By the river I sit. I keep my eyes closed as tight as I can. It’s the best form of time travel I’ve found to date. And sometimes, I accidentally find myself flipping through those May days. Today being one of those. I held on as long as I could, but the sunlight found away to break through and I had to open my eyes to this May day three years down the road where I sit in a swing by the river staring so hard down into my own eyelashes that I could watch the light refract through them. I can’t bear to look up and not for a long time anyway, because the sky’s going to still be teasing me behind the leaves and the water’s still going to be running home and you aren’t going to be standing right there. I see you more with my eyes closed.

I want to know.....

The Invitation by Oriah
It doesn’t interest me
what you do for a living.
I want to know
what you ache for
and if you dare to dream
of meeting your heart’s longing.

It doesn’t interest me
how old you are.
I want to know
if you will risk
looking like a fool
for love
for your dream
for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn’t interest me
what planets are
squaring your moon…
I want to know
if you have touched
the centre of your own sorrow
if you have been opened
by life’s betrayals
or have become shrivelled and closed
from fear of further pain.

I want to know
if you can sit with pain
mine or your own
without moving to hide it
or fade it
or fix it.

I want to know
if you can be with joy
mine or your own
if you can dance with wildness
and let the ecstasy fill you
to the tips of your fingers and toes
without cautioning us
to be careful
to be realistic
to remember the limitations
of being human.

It doesn’t interest me
if the story you are telling me
is true.
I want to know if you can
disappoint another
to be true to yourself.
If you can bear
the accusation of betrayal
and not betray your own soul.
If you can be faithless
and therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see Beauty
even when it is not pretty
every day.
And if you can source your own life
from its presence.

I want to know
if you can live with failure
yours and mine
and still stand at the edge of the lake
and shout to the silver of the full moon,
“Yes.”

It doesn’t interest me
to know where you live
or how much money you have.
I want to know if you can get up
after the night of grief and despair
weary and bruised to the bone
and do what needs to be done
to feed the children.

It doesn’t interest me
who you know
or how you came to be here.
I want to know if you will stand
in the centre of the fire
with me
and not shrink back.

It doesn’t interest me
where or what or with whom
you have studied.
I want to know
what sustains you
from the inside
when all else falls away.

I want to know
if you can be alone
with yourself
and if you truly like
the company you keep
in the empty moments.

As the trees wake up and the flowers wake up, I yawn, and hear a rumbling inside me that must mean I’m waking up too.
And it’s been a long winter. It’s been long. I found my way through the snow. The inches, the feet of it.
But it’s past me now and I like unfolding like the maple leaf, the oak leaf, the tulip leaf.
I want to have a conversation with myself. I want to see who this girl is now. I just don’t know where to start.
I listen to the spring peepers signing in their cool waters and I can only here them thrumming and I can only hear their elation's and tidings.
And that’s enough for now. So, I will wait on the lighting bug. Their arrival is days away, but I know it is coming.
I’ll stand is dewy grass, one warm July evening and I’ll whisper my secrets. I’ll ask them my questions and they’ll light up night sky. They will burn green until they land at God’s feet and he’ll know what to whisper back.

I’m meant for someplace else.

I don’t know how to explain it to you other than, it’s there, that someplace else, when I close my eyes.
It's stuck to the back of my eyelids.
Sometimes I see glimpses of it through brown eyelashes
if the light’s just right.

About loosing my nerve....

I’ve tried to keep my nerve all day. But I am loosing it now. As lights go off all over the house, all over the neighborhood, all over the universe, I feel what today was. It settles, darkly ,inside of my gut, inside of my heart. It aches, and it pounds and I have lost my nerve. I don’t think it takes much to loose it. A change in lighting, a slight shift in breathing , a faster pace of a heart beat and it is easily sent propelling up and out of your throat and poof, it’s gone. Just like that. Your former nerve is just another tragedy in the atmosphere. Without it, I cry. And damn-it, I’ve tried hard all day not to cry. I fell like I cried enough yesterday, quietly onto my brother's back passenger truck window as we drove to dinner, later softly into my jacket on the way home, and then gut wrenchingly into you shirt when I went to bed. It’s just that, I don’t think there’s any stopping it when you loose your nerve like that, in the dark. Sometimes, your throat just betrays you. Sometimes the light betrays you. And sometimes, it’s just your heart.

I try to think about where you have gone. The best I can figure is that you crawled into one of those black holes you were so fond of. There you are on the event horizon and then you go. You don’t look back, just forward into that point of no return. I read once, that while you can’t see a black hole, it can be observed by the way it interacts with other matter. And since I can't see you, but I can feel you, that must be where you are. I am the other matter. We all are the other matter and you orbit us. I think that’s where you are, but I don’t know. Sometimes, you see, I see you in things around me. I see you in flowers, sunflowers always. I see in on a certain couch, under a certain blanket watching movies. I see you at Giant Springs walking there beside the river. I feel you as the wind blow through my curls. I see you always on the back of my eyelids.
You are everywhere and nowhere I can put my finger on.

I have waited on this day for months so, as I’ve wrote before, that I can understand what years without you are like. This day is here though, and I have lost my nerve for it. Instead, I want to go back 372 days and tell you that I love you and then maybe you would have stayed. I want to go back 380 days and get on a plane. It seems, I loose my nerve a lot.

So you're there where ever that may be and I’m here, where ever this is. And I hope you can hear me when I say thank you for loving me. Thank you for loving me when I was just a girl at a concert. For loving me when I was just a girl in black and white, When I was just a girl in crazy fonts and flashing cursers. Thank you for loving me when I was just a girl on a path, with curly hair and a foxy camera. Thank you for loving me when I was just a girl who was broken. Thank you for loving me from the tip of that one hair that always sticks up to the tip of those toes that you didn’t think were to bad(although, not as “nice as yours.”) Thank you for loving me when I was just a girl, just a nobody on a green porch swing on a May morning, swinging into the morning light, ready for the day. Thank you for kissing me in the rain just because if felt like the right thing to do. Thank you for the hours of words. Thank you for all the new people you brought me and all those Waitt’s were worth it. Thank you for the lessons both flora and fauna…..and foto. Thank you, simply, for loving me, even if love is rarely simple. I figure I’ll always feel like we were cheated of time, but I’ll never figure that I went through this life unloved. And I mean loved in that big unexplainable, honest to goodness, real, unconditional way.

I love you, you see and I miss you. Still. Always.

Everyone knows the yellow ones are the best

I plunged my chubby fingers into a pile of yellow leaves. They rolled around in my hand damp and fragile. I pulled them to my face and took in that smell of left over summer. I just stood there, sniffing leaves. You know how everyone has a favorite colored M&M; how everyone swears they taste different? Well, leaves are like that, and the yellow ones smell the best. Some how, I know this isn’t the craziest thing I’ve ever done. It’s not the craziest thing I’ll ever do. What’s crazy is that I do these things and I write them down so the whole world can know that I stand outside on October mornings and inhale the scent of fallen and fading leaves.

Anyway, I stood there with this yellow, molding leaf in my red, chapped hand and I thought about the seasons. I know that the seasons are often used as a metaphor for the different periods in life(birth, youth, adulthood, death etc) and yet all I could do this morning is think about them and compare them to the ways I’ve dealt with death and grieving. It’s winter and it’s cold and jarring; a direct shock to your system that threatens to keep you frozen. When winter comes, the wind blows and it’s foreboding and it brings a sometime unnatural quiet. Then, it’s spring and the moments, the things you thought were long gone start to stir in you and everything starts to look new again. When spring comes the new green grass reminds you that we all go back to the earth, we all filter that grass. When spring comes, sometimes you get reacquainted with life. Then comes summer. It’s warm again, and you get comfortable under the shade of the tree , by the bend of the river. You hear the water rush by . You spend hours outside just reacquainting yourself to the idea of the warmth. You get days with more sunlight, and it keeps the dark at bay. The fall comes and reminds you that these things that once where, aren’t always. Fall comes and you cross your fingers and you hope to take in all the color you can. Fall comes you think you can learn a little form the trees. You hope you can get everything you have to get done before it’s too late and you can spend your days full and lovely and when the moment comes, you go out on those last few days in an explosion of glory. This is when you take stock. This is when you life and learn and you get prepared, you get ready for another winter and you hope you’ve soaked in enough color and enough warmth, enough understanding to make it through another winter.

So, here it is. Fall. My favorite time of year. My favorite time and yet, all I want is for winter to hurry up and get here so snow can blanket and freeze the ground. So winter can get here and the clouds can explode, letting snow cover up the remainder of this crap year that is 2009 in a blanket of white , giving 2010 a clean start. I want winter and this new year to get here so fully understand what year’s without you are like; a new year where I can practice this new forever. A new winter where I can finally see this new me and this old me can marry in some useful and suitable way.

I read this today. I guess I needed it.

I really hate that a magazine made me cry, but alas............


"I miss you now more than ever before. But, I trust that God will open a door and show me how to go on without you to give me some hope and comfort too.

For you were my life and I love you so dear and it breaks my heart to not have you near. But, life goes one and I will too. I just wish it wouldn't go on without you.

All My Love......."