a lone goose just flew by outside, honking as if to inject its solitude with conversation.
when i say “just” i mean five minutes or so ago when i began thinking this thought. a lot of other thoughts have come and gone in the space between, but the goose remained.
i started to write a poem today about sunshine, but neither materialized.
i was wondering, once upon thursday, why it has to get dark. i had this thought on a particularly sunny, bright blue day. i think it was yesterday. then i went outside after hours and looked up into the icy, winter-clear sky.
and i knew why. if it never got dark, we couldn’t see the stars.
on the practical side, if it were light all the time outside i don’t think i’d sleep well. my sleeping habits get indignant enough as it is when they’re interrupted.
how is it that i’ll be 25 this year? that feels so old; surely just a week ago i thought 21 was old. surely just the week before that i was 19 staring into a void with 20 at the bottom.
now is confusing and foggy, but now is so much better than then, all the same. now understands a lot more then couldn’t.
now tends to take its own advice just as frequently as it ever did, so in that case things aren’t so far removed from then.
drat.
but for all that i complain i don’t have anything to complain about. life is strange and wonderful but sometimes i see only the ugly parts.
mostly these are the ugly parts of me that i say i want to change but am too lazy and comfortable to do anything about.
lately i’ve been tired. my back has hurt. my shoulder has hurt. my hands have hurt. the skin between my fingers is red and cracked and unsightly. i’ve not slept well, or enough. sometimes i silently take it out on other people, asking them from behind my eyes whether they’ve forgotten i need some white space.
then i remembered richard wurmbrand and his fellow prisoners who were sleep-deprived, starving, drugged, humiliated, tortured and verbally abused, and how they would be beaten even more if they sat or fell down from exhaustion.
i don’t have anything to complain about.
i saw a dead possum lying in the middle of the road, looking the way dead possums tend to.
sleepy and sore though i may be, i am very much alive and all my blood and guts contained in their proper places.
life is good. it just depends on what you’re looking at.
darling, i wish you were here.
sometimes so much that it’s alarming.
but not yet. i realize i am intended to be here, and you are intended to be there — wherever there is.
i have dreams and big ideas starring you and about three to seven little products of cross-pollination. but first there are dreams that have no place for you and i must live them. i will live them, loving fiercely.
this is not easy. i know you know this because the dreams you’re living now, whatever they are, can’t be easy either. there is a little coward in me that sometimes wants to run and hide and not deal with difficulty.
but it must be done. do i think weaving two dreams into one will be easy? i sing alto; i know harmony easily slips into discord.
there is now and there is someday. someday it will never be dark again.
but for now it is.
good night, star bright.
