leftovers

These are exactly as labeled: leftovers. thoughts. emotions. ideas. From the last month or more. Mostly mine, I think. Finally grown up and finished, I think. Ah, I lied. The first one ends too abruptly and I know it, but this is my temporary cop out. (and now it has been editted again...)



Here I am stuck again
With eyes so dry
They make the desert weep.

It is not that I do not want to release
And feel the salt water oceans pour down over me,
Just that I do not quite remember how to swim.

At first,
I was waiting
Until I felt safe enough.

But I forgot
who it is
who makes me safe.

And I forgot what a fickle thing
Security can be
to chase.

How do you end a drought
you requested, demanded, created?

How can salt water
possibly make an oasis
of any desert much less me?

Shall I grow
myself a salt garden
with glistening roses and petunias?

But how?
Especially when it feels like
everything that will be watered

must die again.
So I wait
to grow my sparkling garden.

And say always, "tomorrow".

-----------------------------------------------------

I have read about people who have woken up to confront change staring toe to toe with them without warning. And it really does happen like that sometimes. You go to sleep and a strange wind creeps in through all the cracks and takes away the familiar. The more often it happens, the more familiar the feeling is even in its unarguable foreignness. In a way, the more you know this wind, the more foreign you yourself have become.

So when the air greeted me with the first auntumn kiss I had been given in more than a few months, I knew there was more afoot and overhead than cool weather and geese flying south. Fall was coming, sure, or was already here. But it came with a mission: to sweep away the past and pack it away.

Summer was a memory. That season was over. It was being uprooted and thrown out; and not just summer weather, but the life we lived and the people we were then. Fall had crept in and wrapped its fingers, arms, and heart around my fingers, my arms, and my heart.

It is a good thing that change never asks permission. I never would have grown the way I have, to appreciate it and even to love it. As it is, Change just comes, shakes the world, and lies down for a bit--only to fade when the requisite newness and pedantic instability wear off. That is what I wait for, the new normal. Let North settle northerly and let gravity find the ground. Then we who are left can build.