Ghosts & Wind.

It's a porch. It's not mystic or surreal. But I'm sitting there and looking at the sun, all stretched out and comfortable. I'm totally there, and i'm totally not as the moments float past. I'm lost in the moments passing sometimes. I'm also lost in moments already past.

So is she sometimes. i can tell when the tense changes in the telling. Sometimes we are in present tense. Sometimes it is the tension long held and the conversation crosses the grave of something we've buried. The it becomes the past tension making the present tense.

I'm not sure how I spun up that dust, that wind. I've been swirling gently in it all week. Perhaps it's simply summer. Maybe it's uncorking the past three years. Or it could just be that this is how healthy feels. To be able to move gently through the past and the present with a palpable absence of pain is pretty new and strange to me. 

I worried sometimes that my tears came too easily now, you know, after the fall. My dad used to be like that when something touched his heart it pushed his tears right out. I told him not to be embarassed about his emotions, so I didn't have to hide mine either. There was no need to worry anyway. They slowed on their own. Sometimes now they only come when I call. 

As I sat there with nothing but my thoughts, I often feel another person, see another glass on the table, stacked with ice and a piece of fruit. When we shared desert I was totally there and strangely gone, like the flavor between bites. The old taste flees to make room for the new. It becomes hard in a moment to tell if this is a new goodness, or the memory of an old sweetness. 

In that moment it really doesn't matter what manner of sweetness is on the tongue. I'm just tasting it all, tasting it all again. 

I'm still tasting. 

No matter if it's food or people, fear or challenge, we all step away from something every time we step. Even when we step towards something else. At times I think that if I move forward to fast I will lose track of where I have come from. Of who and where I have been. It's bullshit. 

No matter were we go, what we do, who we become, ghosts and wind and memories travel with us. The memories change quickly as we grow, slowly as we age and never if we freeze them in frames we call perfection or hate or can't or some other inflexible thought that holds them trapped. 

Ghosts and wind are beyond our control. We only feel them as they move around us, touch us, mess our hair. We look, or we don't. Our choice, really. 

I sat at a table alone on Sunday. The first time I've felt calm in 3 years. I was surprised to find myself looking into myself, not away. When I did glance around my head it was strange to see no pictures in frames on the table anymore. The memories were fluid and quiet. They did not require my attention anymore. They were simply okay. I could pick them up in my head and look and then return them to the air. They had lost their sharp edges. 

And him, he has become some combination of ghost and wind. Something of who I thought I knew wrapped in currents that were familiar and foreign. You can reach for both. You can hold neither. 

Today the ghosts in the wind are smiling somehow....I can feel it. The people I can't hold, the steps I'll never take toward, the possible choices never made, they all visit and swirl happily. 
It's also a happy thought that some of you are caught up in the wind. 

Anyway, thats where I've been. 

Standing like an oak as it whips my hair around like leafy branches on a sunny day when the world is content, as the ghosts play among the branches. 

They may not know that I'm looking. But I am. 

And although I am sad today, I'm trying to be happy for his sake.
It's strange to feel happy.