the white blossom petals are falling like snow from the tree outside my kitchen window. The day is sunny and the breeze through the windowscreen is lusty warm and caressing, no longer barren and stealing like it was only a few days ago. The summer places in me rise and clamor within the encasement, and wreck the sleek neat shell of my winter heart.
Could it be that I'm already dead? Like just waiting for the flesh to catch up, which tags along like a distracted child, its course diverted by every little curiosity, while the impatient mother—my soul—sighs heavily.
"Will you hurry-up! We should be gone already."
Should we? And anyway, how can I be already dead, I just did laundry! Surely such industry is incompatible with being dead...
it's time to eat; not of course a real meal, but a pint of Ben & Jerry's. And it's time already to go to bed. I get completely lost here in front of this computer. I just noticed a cold cup of coffee, still in the microwave. I must have put there an hour ago. I waste so much time tweaking these pages, futzing with code, evading... evading what—I don't know. Just evading.
Judi called earlier (much earlier) feeling bad. She'd had to leave Jake's award ceremony because the baby was tearing around the gym at Jake's school, raising a two-year-old ruckus, disturbing the adults—and maybe the kids too, trying hard to be adult. She wanted me to tell her she wasn't a bad mommy for missing her 9-year-old's event, and I did, but really, she was just feeling bad for losing yet another of rapid childhood's one-and-only moments, forever missed.
Though minor, these are true losses, and irretrievable, like the time my father offered to take me on a hike, and in a tantrum I refused. These memories draw to themselves all the orphaned sorrow, the saddnesses that no longer have a link to their origin. Such memories come to represent for us our sense of forfeiture for all that we have ever missed.
time is on our side. The missing of important moments, our seperations from those we love, and even (or, perhaps especially) the physical space between me, who hides from the world, and the blossom-shedding tree rustling in the warm breeze that I peek at through my kitchen window, are all proof to me that time is on our side. There is no beginning and no end, and no real seperations, only apparent ones. How would One ever be able to know the concept of loss, or experience another, without becoming Many? The expansion of One creates you and me, creates time and space, and creates of itself an infinite number of endless journies that would have been forever missed if One had stayed just one.
I am exactly where I am supposed to be, and so are you. 'Supposed to be' not on the basis of any convention, like work schedules, or lover expectations; but 'supposed to be' in accordance with the origin, as it relates to the destination. And I am not just somewhere in between, I am exactly at that precise spot—in between the beginning and the end—that is mine, and only mine.
I do not want to go. Not to the store right now, not to work tomorrow, not further on into the late night that should still be just early afternoon for me, and not even down to the laundry-room where that, too, still waits. There are a billion things I need yet to say, and only a million chances left to say them, and I waste a thousand chances every day.
I want to cry: not in sorrow for anything I've lost, but in joy for having had the chance to lose.
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