Unconfirmed Miracles

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In the end, we believe what we want to believe.

It’s always bothered me when people tell the story of how the lost car keys saved their life.  You know, the one that goes like this: “I spent an extra 15 minutes searching for my keys this morning and I was so mad because I was going to be late for work. But then, while driving, I passed a huge accident. An escape convict in a stolen car ran the light and the other driver was blasted to smithereens.  I am so blessed because God saved me from being in that accident and it was a miracle.”

Is that a fact?  I always want to ask if it’s a fact but it seems rude to question other people’s miracles.

But is it? A miracle, I mean.  That’s the conundrum, we can’t know what would’ve happened if... because it didn’t.

On the flip side of the coin, how do we know miracles don’t happen dozens of times each and every day? Maybe you were day dreaming and missed the exit, maybe someone had to go and get a flat tire right in front of you, maybe you lost your car in the parking lot or maybe nothing out of the ordinary happened at all but someone else lost their keys or missed their exit thus preventing them from T-boning you at an intersection.

We don’t go around saying, “Nothing happened today and it was miracle!” But maybe we should.

Miracle or coincidence?

What if the keys were hanging on the hook in the kitchen and you left right on time? Would you definitely have been in the accident or, might it have still involved the same two cars?  There are no tangible answers but yet we still want to believe and can’t dissuade ourselves from looking for evidence.

Believing that events have meaning seems to be hardwired in our DNA despite the fact that the only supporting evidence lies in outcomes that never transpired. Human minds can find evidence to support absolutely anything at all so long as we want to believe it.

All miracles aside, perhaps the single most important evolutionary development that allowed humans to rise up the food chain was the ability to recognize patterns.  We see imaginary faces in clouds and in trees just as easily as spotting the gaze of a predator from within the tall grass.

Pattern recognition allowed us to navigate by the stars and to know when to plant the crops.  The FBI uses pattern recognition to profile serial killers and boxers use it to land a knock out punch.

Have we become so skilled at pattern recognition that we are now able to observe the wheels in the sky orchestrating the big picture?   Well, maybe, but we do know this: humans can process seven things at once, give or take two depending on I.Q and coffee intake.  Because there are a million or so observable things happening at all times, it hardly makes sense that we should focus our attention on seven of them and then call that reality.

Hey, do me a favor right quick and tell me which side of this mask is concave and in which direction it is turning?

Even knowing beforehand that it is an optical illusion, your brain cannot stop seeing the illusion.  So my question is, what if you didn’t know or even suspect that there was another angle from which to view something? Chances are you would accept it at face value.

In the same way that the A minor is relative to the key of C major – the same pattern from an altered perspective reveals a completely different thing.

The power of perspective and observation will make your beliefs about the world true, but only in your own world.

In November of 2004, shortly after making the final payment, my car was stolen out of my mom’s driveway.  My purse was in it along with my phone, camera gear, a suitcase of clothes plus all of my CD’s and the spare keys to my house including the garage door opener.  We were returning from a road trip and I was dropping her off. Not planning to stay long, I went inside but then ended up staying for dinner.

Let me tell you, there’s nothing quite like the feeling of returning to the spot where your car was, now gone without a trace.

Needless to say, the empty driveway was more than a little inconvenient. My insurance company flatly did not believe me about the contents of the car and refused to pay for anything except the actual car itself. Naturally I had closed my bank accounts immediately but this did not stop the crooks from writing my canceled checks all over town and it did not stop the collection agencies from pursuing me in an effort to collect funds for all the bounced checks.

The car debacle took months of unpleasantness to rectify.  To make myself feel better, I fired my insurance company.  I don’t want to name names but let’s just pretend they were called Allstate, and I told myself that perhaps I wasn’t as unlucky as it seemed.

Could I have experienced an unconfirmed miracle?  There’s no way to know what would’ve happened if my car hadn’t been stolen so I thought why not assume the best?  Maybe my perspective was all wrong and I thought I was looking at a picture of a horse when it was actually a frog, maybe I can’t tell which side of the mask is concave and which is convex.

Had my car been waiting for me in the driveway, like it had been for the past seven years, I may have driven it under a truck the next morning on my way to work.  I may have been driving too fast, swerved to miss a stray dog and crashed through the guard rail, plummeting to a fiery death.

Or, I could just be the unlucky victim of a very expensive crime.

Blessing or curse?

Unprovable either way so the verdict is out for interpretation.

But does it matter? Our interpretation, I mean.  Does it affect the actual truth?  I believe it does not.  Universal law is what it is and certainly doesn’t care what we think of it.  Gravity doesn’t go away or get stronger based on the strength of our conviction that gravity is real.  The difference being, of course, that gravity is provable.  Gravity can be demonstrated in predictable and consistent ways.

Unconfirmed miracles on the other hand, not so much.

But does that mean they aren’t real?

Last year in March, Xavier and I went to see David Sedaris at the Joseph Myerhoff Symphony Hall in Baltimore.

He was wearing the owl tie that I given him the previous year after his performance at Popejoy Hall in Albuquerque.  Xavier and I stayed for the book signing after the show so I could remind Mr. Sedaris that I was the one who had given him the tie (and therefore probably his biggest fan).

He remembered me and said it was the only owl gift from the book tour that he hadn’t thrown away.

Xavier and I arrived in Baltimore early so we would have plenty of time to park and to eat before the show.  We found a good parking space on a residential street that was a five minute walk from the theater.  We both made it a point to memorize the exact address so we wouldn’t forget where we left the car.

212 Park Avenue.  Simple enough.

If you’ve ever been to see David Sedaris, you know it’s not unreasonable to stand in line for 2-3 hours to get a book signed after the show.  By the time we left the theater, it was after midnight.

Midnight in Baltimore is unsettling.  Dark, cold, raining, and a bad reputation for crime in the streets.

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On the upside, at least we knew that the car was nearby.  Xavier put the address in his phone and we began walking, and walking, and walking.  We walked much further than we knew we should have and were passing things that did not look familiar but the map said we were going the right way.

Sensing that something was amiss, we cleared the route and re-entered the address.  This time the map showed us a different route and, though irritated, we felt relieved to have finally found the right way.

Did I mention that it was raining and that I was wearing high heels?

Once again we set out towards the car.  Walking quickly and confidently so as to not look like what we were – small town folk wandering lost in the streets of Baltimore at 1:00am, or in other words, likely to get mugged – we said that the map was stupid and clearly to blame for this predicament.

Lost in unfamiliar territory,  I was getting blisters on my feet and trying to stay cool like Fonzie.  This was no time to come unhinged.

We followed the map and we walked some more. A lot more.

At this point, most couples would’ve started bickering over who was at fault. We did not, and thus passed some kind of ill-timed cosmic compatibility test. Nothing brings out the true colors like being cold, tired, and scared.  For a moment I thought of the movie Open Water and hoped we would not suffer the same fate.

The map said we were headed right to the car but it was becoming obvious that we were nowhere near the car and probably even further away than before re-entering the address.

You know that feeling when you wake up in a hotel room and, just for a split second, don’t know where you are? Disconcertion and panic until the rest of your brain fires up and delivers the pertinent info?  Yeah, it was like that, minus the resolution.

Had we wandered into an alternate dimension? Seriously, what the hell was happening?

We walked around downtown Baltimore for an hour and half in the middle of night, following our map on one wild goose chase after another.

Eventually, when we ready to give up and find benches to sleep on, Xavier noticed that there were not one, and not two, but actually three streets with the name Park Avenue in the vicinity of Joseph Myerhoff Symphony Hall.

Hilarious.

At 1:45 in the morning, we finally found our way to the right 212 Park Avenue and to our car that was waiting for us.

We drove home without incident.

Was the universe fucking with us or keeping us away from the car for a specific reason?  Could this be yet another Unconfirmed Miracle?

Think what you will but I’ll tell you this.  Not one person threatened or even approached us while we wandered.  Neither of our phone batteries died.  Xavier did not lose the keys.  The car started right up and we did not get in an accident on the way home.  If the universe were fucking with us, wouldn’t something have actually happened? Wouldn’t we have gotten mugged or wrecked the car on the highway?

What did happen is that we were delayed by an hour and a half by a very bizarre map anomaly.

While we were shivering in the rain thinking what a bullshit scenario we had found ourselves in, maybe we were seeing the optical illusion and the truth is that we were being guided away from something sinister – a Bogey Man in the night who would’ve found us had things gone as planned.

There’s no way to know but, in the end, it’s what I choose to believe.

 


Poison Apples

 

“Democracy doesn’t work in a large and diverse country when all we do is demonize each other.”  

– Barack Obama

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By the way, you can tell if someone is a demon because they smell like sulfur… or so I’ve heard.

Would you rather watch in horror as the oncoming train rounds the bend or just play Candy Crush on your phone until the sudden stop?  And the bigger question, does it really affect the outcome one way or the other?

This dilemma, of whether or not the knowledge is worth the burden, has become the American condition.

I know I should probably be following the election more closely. I should tune in everyday to get my fair share of abuse but spending any measurable amount of time in the electoral theater of the absurd is just too much, even for me.

I try to imagine what Hunter Thomson’s new book would be called and, to wit, he killed himself some time ago. You know, before things got really weird.

The dangers of daily mindset training, when the monologue runs amok through fun house mirrors, is that a mind unhinged on fear and loathing will believe absolutely anything so long as it pushes the sore tooth.

“It used to take one, now it takes four. You don’t get me high anymore.”        

 -Phantogram

Having developed a tolerance to psychotropic nonsense at levels previously believed to be fatal, it takes more and more to get us high nowadays.  And make no mistake, we’re utterly intoxicated but the thrills grow harder to come by.

The first election in which I was old enough to vote was Dub-ya VS. Al Gore.  No one is actually going to vote for this clown, I thought to myself while watching George W. on TV for the first time.

I was mistaken but good ole W seems like Norman Rockwell compared to the angry orange man whose supporters have put forth the proposition that the 19th Amendment should be repealed. In case you missed that day in history class, the 19th Amendment is the one that gives women the right to vote. Apparently Trump’s army of Trumplets feel their right by might, pussy grabbing, “let’s build a wall” and “show me the birth certificate” candidate would have a better chance of winning if all those pesky women voters would just pipe down and get back to the business folding laundry and mixing cocktails.

But hold on a minute, raise your hand if you remember that Trump briefly threw his hat in the race when Obama was up for reelection in 2012.  Does anyone remember why he quit?   According to The Washington Post, he dropped out of the race in favor of keeping his show, The Celebrity Apprentice, on the air.  Personally, I think that after weighing the cost of the campaign vs. his chance of dying a slow and humiliating death while debating Obama, he decided to wait and run against someone whom he thought would be easier to beat – like a woman. Naturally, he presumed himself to have a better chance of winning if he ran against a woman but that is, of course, just my opinion.

I have voted in every election since 2000 when Al Gore won the popular vote but did not get elected and have been asking the same question every time:  Is this the best we’ve got?  

The republicans evidently lack even a single qualified person in their ranks who is willing to step up.  By qualified, I mean capable of doing more than make bumper sticker insults, not confusing religion for science, and perhaps being able to name all 50 states would be good too.

Sarah Palin’s idiocy single handedly killed John McCain’s campaign in 2008 but, even in the midst of that debacle, McCain called out a woman and set her straight when she shouted out that Obama was a terrorist at one of his rallies.

Two days ago, Trump approved conspiracy theorist, Alex Jones, concluded that Hillary Clinton was a bona fide, according to Hoyle, demon.  But don’t take my word for it, see for yourself.

Wow. And for this he gets a fat thumbs-up from Trump.

How broken does your mind have to be to watch that video and think it sounds reasonable?

As it turns out, it really does matter what you put in your brain hole.

I would watch the debates but there’s just no point except to get all riled up.  I’ve made my mind up awhile ago and let’s be clear, I wouldn’t vote for Hillary just because she’s a woman and I wouldn’t vote for her just because she’s a Democrat. Absolutely not, in fact I wish the Republicans could send out a qualified candidate so that there would be an actual choice to make. But this is not a choice. Neither was the last election, or the one before that, or the one before that. Sufficed to say, it’s been awhile.

Each passing election pushes the envelope between extreme politics and certifiable insanity. Worst of all, the pandering to the lowest common denominator has now made it cool to have the title Fucktard appear after one’s name where the letters MD or Ph.D may have once been coveted.  Before too long they’ll be pouring Gatorade on plants…

And here we are, either turning off the TV, unfriending people on Facebook and closing the blinds to the outside world or standing around the Tree Of Questionable Knowledge gorging our sticky faces on poison apples and waiting for the rapture.

Staying informed, what a bitch.

 

A Time To Create

 

“We’ll not be given time to create, we be asked to create in real time.”

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Two years ago, I fled to the Sky Island Mountains to seek shelter from the turmoil and recharge my soul under the blazing sky.

In retrospect, that is why all of us were there. Why so many would travel from so far to meet on the mountain in the name of finding the flow.

Some said it was a cult, and they were probably right, but we went anyway.

Nothing was good on the day I left and I drove for a very long time.

What happened next changed everything in an instant. The lights came on and it was time to start over.

Xavier was standing on the porch at the end of the road to Oracle.

Accusations were made and some said it was contrived.

It was not.

With more unlikely details than I could possibly arrange, somethings fall outside my scope of practice and this was one of them.

But even if it was, contrived that is, I say “what of it?” and advise the inquisition to walk away peacefully while they still can.

Two years ago in a flurry of fear and hurt and desperation, I went to a retreat to study Tai Chi and drink wine with my friends.

Instead, I met a boy and we played push hands and fell in love on the couch.

We’re married now but getting married was easy. Easy compared to the force of nature it took to bring us together and break us free.

The wedding was nice but this was the day of creation.

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The Car

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An old man sat in his car.

His feet hurt and there was no one around.

He used to be my downstairs neighbor but he had shady roommates and things had clearly taken a turn for the worse.

The car has been in the parking lot of the grocery store for two weeks. It doesn’t run and he doesn’t run either. The bus stop for the shelter is too far and besides, he’s barefoot and doesn’t want to go anyway.

He was my downstairs neighbor and that was unfortunate for him because I live on the 4th floor and he can barely walk, or wear shoes, or stand up straighter than 45 degrees.

Lord knows why his kin put him in a 3rd floor apartment, maybe they hoped that once he was up there he wouldn’t be able to get back down.  I just hoped he didn’t set the building on fire because, for all of his shortcomings and ineptitudes, he was a master of chain smoking. Sitting on his balcony all god damed day, smoking one cigarette after another and blowing the smoke right in to my living room though notable, was not his most endearing quality.

Honestly, I had no warm fuzzies for the guy or his meth mouthed daughter and her crack head boyfriend. Xavier complained to the front office and called the police for various disturbances more times than I can count.

One time, at 6:30 on a Tuesday morning, all the 4th floor neighbors were awakened by the jangle of what sounded like my grandmother’s telephone and a wild pounding at the door. It turned out to be the fire alarm and the old man wielding a mag light.

Psychotic breaks are more entertaining when they happen after the sun comes up so, as you can imagine, the neighbors did not see the humor in a wild eyed lunatic tripping the fire alarm after sprinting up the stairs to escape the men with guns and knives that were not in his apartment trying to kill him.

Xavier called the police, again.

Then one day the old man and his entourage left. They left but their stuff didn’t and the maintenance crew had the best day ever gleefully tossing all their furniture off the 3rd floor balcony. It was glorious, I sat outside and watched.

From time to time the police would come looking for them. The car would reappear in different parts of the apartment complex. I don’t know where they went but they didn’t live downstairs anymore so I mostly forgot about them.

Two weeks ago Xavier and I found the car at the grocery store. It lay dead in the far corner of the parking lot, trash bags closed in the doors to keep the rain out and a note taped to the window.

I think now that I am idiot for not taking a picture of the note because it summed up the prevailing lack of forethought that is the defining characteristic of this whole situation.

The note was from the old man to meth mouth and crack head saying where he was staying and at what number he could be reached.  I don’t know how the recipients were supposed to know to find the car in the grocery store parking lot and, if he had access to a phone, why he didn’t just call them in the first place.  It occurs to me now that they are or were likely in jail and therefore not available to chat but if that is the case then what was the point of the note?

Xavier and I went to the store yesterday to pick up some sushi for lunch. The car was still there, sans the trash bags and the note, but this time the old man was sitting in it.

Apparently homeless and no doubt barefoot, he and his car were in a sad state of decline. Xavier called the police to speak with adult protective services. They came out but there wasn’t much they could do. The old man was having a moment of clarity and wanted to stay in the car and it was evidentially his prerogative to do so.

He told the officer that he was broke until his disability check came so maybe when the postman delivers it to the car he can go to a hotel.



What’s Your Elephant?

I could keep waiting for people to change or I could change and the latter necessarily meant it was time to boss-up with no remorse for the blood in the water.

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It’s been said that to carve an elephant from a block of wood, all one needs to do is cut away everything that does not resemble an elephant.

It would not do to lament the corners of the block or the shavings of wood that are cut away. They are not elephant shaped, so why would you want them?

To hold on to things that do not serve begs the same question: why would you even want them?

I took some time off from writing this blog but now, on a rainy day in Easterville, I have something to say.

It was time to clean house because the elephant had become unrecognizable.

Asking people for things they don’t have with the persistence of a dog scratching fleas is, well, exhausting to say the least.

The definition of insanity after all is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

I could keep on keeping’ on, waiting for people to change while time keeps on slipping’, or I could change and the latter necessarily meant it was time to boss-up with no remorse for the blood in the water.

You know what I’m talking about.

If your elephant is integrity, why do you rationalize?

If your elephant is honesty, why are you willing to live a lie?

If your elephant is better relationships, why do you pursue people who are less than worthy of your attention?

If your elephant is enlightenment, why do you stay asleep?

The alarm is going off, it’s time to wake up.

 

Zero Fucks Given: The End Of Brangelina

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Facebook has a major case of the poo-butt.  Everyone is heartbroken over the demise of Brangelina. 

It’s the end of an era, like when the dinosaurs died out and you could no longer buy cars with 8-track players in the dash.

I wonder if they can return all those children? Probably not, but maybe if they still have the receipts.  I mean, it couldn’t hurt to ask. Right?

Anyway…

One time, when I was 24, Angelina Jolie helped me get a job by marrying Billy Bob Thornton at the Little Church Of The West in Las Vegas. I didn’t work there, yet.

The chapel photographer assigned to the case shot a few extra rolls of film and sold the photos to The National Enquirer. This lead to her immediate termination and to my  phone ringing with a job offer. So thank you, Angelina Jolie, I owe you one.

I don’t know why Billy Bob and Angie called it quits. Maybe because she kept rescuing children from atop floating doors? Who knows but here’s some ironic shit, Brad Pitt adopted all of Angelina’s adopted kids after they got married so technically he has to pay child support on them now.

In a similar situation my step-brother, Will, married a woman named Moonshine who was already pregnant with another man’s baby.  When she had the baby, Will put his name on the birth certificate as the father even though his-dad-my-step-dad told him that was a sucker move and not to do it.  Twenty-some years later, Will and Moonshine are still married and have so many damn kids that they have forgotten the first one’s name.  Because he is confused about the nature of responsibility, Will has gotten really fat and miserable.  We don’t communicate.

Facebook may have it’s panties all in a bunch but, personally, I’m not losing sleep over the status of celebrity marriages.  Because why? Why should I care?

When I was going through hard times, getting divorced, neck-deep in financial shit, in serious danger of losing both my house and my car to foreclosure and under constant threat of multiple law suits, did Brangelina express their concern in any kind of way? Phone call? Facebook message? Condolence card? Dinner for two at Taco Bell? Were they there for me in my hour of need?

No, zero fucks given by Brangelina. I feel it’s only fair to reciprocate.

 

 

 

Alternate Outcomes

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It’s strange how the simple things in life go on while we become more difficult. 

-Richard Brautigan 

 

I heard the news today.

He died of cancer.

I had no idea he had fallen ill.

His wife probably did, since she was there and all.

A new widow has flowers in a vase now and many condolences.

And to think I was once jealous of their house.

 

 

In The Way

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Earlier today I found this piece in my Google Drive.  I had saved it there on August 8th, 2014.

I was recently divorced but somehow already involved in a toxic relationship, living alone for the first time ever (at the ripe old age of 38), drowning in oceans of paper and unpleasant memories.

Having never lived alone, I was truly overwhelmed with the magnitude of trying to take care of both the house and the yard plus the pets and myself.  I was hungry too, thus far I had never learned to cook.

And then one day I was alone.

Sort of.

Alone, but all the stuff was still there.

Everywhere.

The good news is that I learned to cook and the bad news is that cooking just added to the mess that I already could not keep up with.

The clutter was about to reach mushroom cloud proportions.

The following story sounds like it’s about stuff – but it’s never really about stuff, is it?

The real clutter that keeps us in the fortress is obligation with no return on investment: toxic relationships are the clutter no one wants to discuss.  Toxic relationships with other people, with our means of earning a living, with outstanding debt for which we have nothing to show.  THIS is the clutter that builds the real fortress.  The toxic relationship that must be addressed is the one we have with ourselves.

I wrote this over a year and a half ago.  I remember sitting in the only clear space in the house, writing it on my Nook because I could not stand to sit at my computer desk.  I was unhappy then but I felt that the stars were orchestrating massive changes, I just had no idea what they had in mind and, frankly, I wished they would hurry the hell up!

It is now January of 2016 and my life is on a completely different trajectory.

While I still struggle to contain the stuff – like unopened mail and such – I promised myself that I would root out the toxic clutter from my life and banish it forever.

I’ve done well.  I’ve been true to myself.  I found an awesome life partner and for this I am particularly thankful.

CLUTTER

written August, 8, 2014

All my life I’ve been immune to clutter. I just didn’t see it, it didn’t bother me. The purpose of empty space was to put something in it. I was indifferent to the clutter until one day, not that long ago, I wasn’t.

I woke up one morning and realized that I was drowning in clutter. It was everywhere.  Where does all this stuff even come from? How did it get here? Most importantly, why won’t it pick itself up?

When I finally started to see the clutter in my environment, I began to understand some other things as well.  For one thing, I saw that all this stuff was literally robbing me of my living space. I could not think or function in my own home and furthermore did not enjoy spending time there. This lead to spending a lot of time and money in coffee shops with wi-fi while the clutter continued to free load off of me, claiming squatter’s rights in my personal space.

It also came to my attention that our external conditions are the physical manifestation of our internal conditions. Clutter is not a coincidence, it means something.  So, for a time, I stopped looking at the house and started looking in the mirror. What’s going on in here, I wondered?

What was going on was a lifetime of out of control clutter.  Mental clutter, intellectual clutter, emotional clutter, personal clutter, professional clutter. It was as if I had never learned to sort things out, never learned to prioritize, never learned to discard things that no longer served me because I feared that I might still need them some day.  Inside was an even bigger mess than the outside!

Lastly, I realized that all this stuff had created a terrific fortress and that I was not at all happy about being trapped inside of this thing.  I not only wanted, but needed, to bring improvement into my life. Different and better circumstances, people, and things but the problem was that the fortress was keeping them away because it was hogging up all the space.  I could not attract better things into my life because I literally had no place to put them!

The first step in getting what you want is letting go of what is in the way.

Above The Clouds

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Here at 30,000 feet the weather is below and the sun is above; hot, bright, burning her face and unchanging.
I’m not even speaking English now, she thinks in vague images.
She’s sleep deprived and hungry but sees the edge of happiness on the horizon.

Clouds like a carpet for a thousand miles and he waits for her in the land of the living.
There is so little time for thinking these days.
But we all know that thinking leads to trying, leads to striving, leads to nowhere except right here anyway.
Remember when we were young and didn’t know what we didn’t know?

We’ll not be given time to create, we’ll be asked to create in real time.
What time?
He has time now, on the road in between, navigating the weather under the clouds.
She has time now too but she looks old today. Maybe it’s because her eyes are tired.

She looks down on creation and wonders why people argue about god, like an opinion matters one way or the other.

The truth doesn’t change and nor does it care.
This road goes nowhere and everywhere.
It goes to the future, but we have to go now.

The plane turns left and the sky is only blue.
He drives.
She flies.
Soon.

Caught In The Moment

 

When the waves roll in

we shall not resist.

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She drove through the misty mountains for what seemed like eternity,
but her face looked the same.
Clouds sat heavy in the cactus,
headlights cut the fog,
humidity soft in her chest.
It was a long drive but not because of the road.
It was a long drive because of the place.

After a lifetime at highway speed
she found the turn
and just like that
the rest of the world could not follow.

She cut the engine and saw him standing on the porch.
He’s here, she thought, and that was all.

**********

They played mind games on the lawn while the Milky Way shuffled its hand.
She sat with him on the couch in the empty house.

They spoke of water and of life.
They spoke of power and of freedom.
They spoke of fire and the way of the mind.
They spoke of everything and of nothing.

Her eyes were open and she saw the things he could not hide no matter how dim the lights.
What began as a respectable distance became no distance at all.

**********

He stood in the breeze of the window,
not anything but himself.
With no good explanation she wrapped herself around him, close, but looking away.
She felt his hand in the small of her back and the other in her hair,
“What’s on your mind, Love?”
Don’t call me that unless you mean it, she thought but did not answer.
Tears rolled down her face and there was no way to stop the breath from catching in her chest.
She knew he noticed.
She saw her life going by, conflict stung her eyes, so many angles to separate the light but not a single word that could be spoken.
She waited for him to push her away, to free himself of her embrace and go back the way he had come.
She waited but he stayed and finally she said, “Sometimes my life seems like such a fantastic mess and sometimes it seems so simple.”
He didn’t know what she meant by that but he knew he was being called so he held her.
There was nowhere else he needed to be.

**********

She slept but he didn’t.
He watched over her the way he always had.
He knew she was playing her cards close, choosing her words carefully.
He didn’t know what was left unsaid but he looked on anyway to see that she was safe in the night.
He was there when the demons approached, when her brow furrowed and her body tensed.
He reached over and put a hand on her chest.
She didn’t wake but pulled him around her like a blanket.
Peace was restored and he could never let go.

**********

He stood on the curb and watched her drive away.
She had slowed down to reach out and take his hand one more time.
He didn’t tell her goodbye, wouldn’t tell her goodbye, but the time had still come for them to part ways.
He watched her leave and went back inside.
He sat on their bed in the middle of the universe.
His heart was coming undone.
It wasn’t the first moment
and it wasn’t the last.