Farewells

It's too many goodbyes, you think, but relish in all the hellos you have yet ahead. It's a gift of your own making, and you're not too far gone to see it. I give myself this love, I give myself this summer. The train darts down the Swedish countryside and you wonder if there's a life hiding there somewhere. 

But it's only August, and none of the questions seem quite so intimidating, quite so dark. It's like they're just fun trinkets you turn over in your hand, like reliquaries in an old English manor house. 

A week ago you were driving against your instincts on a narrow country road, proving things to yourself you never thought you might. Now here you are thinking maybe the world is at your fingertips, after all. 

There was a time when you didn't want to see another day. You know there was, you can almost remember it now. It's just the disease isn't in you today, isn't gouging you out from the inside at this moment, and so the spectre of death as a welcome friend feels like a story you read in a book once, not like a promise you held on your fingertips. 

There will come a day when you don't want to die, 
you told yourself again, again, ad nauseam again,
as if saying it enough would make you believe it
(it didn't). 

Turns out, the prophecy coming true only added fuel to your fire. 

Not only do you not want to die 
now
but you want to live like a hundred stars burst inside of you. 

Like bursting into the stars 
is the gift itself.  

Idea

I am tired. The dog sleeps at my feet under the desk and I think maybe that's the better option. The first days of August are warm outside the window, but I can't fight off that small, worried voice in the back of my head that says fall is coming. It flinches at every chilly breeze, every inkling of cloud cover. You say it sits in your bones but you're starting to wonder if it's a learned fear after all, that it sits in your skin instead. After all, generations of your people have weathered those winters and survived to create you. Do you dishonor them by becoming so soft? 

You remind yourself that Novembers can be mild and delicious in New York. 

Yesterday, at the top of a hill, overlooking the Atlantic, the Mendips, the M5, I thought I am in a moment of my own creation, and it seemed such a gift. How many years was I frozen in catatonia, staring across the waters at other people, living their lives like they were allowed pursuits, thinking such allowances were not for me. 

It's strange the truths we teach ourselves to believe. 

You wonder if it's too late to believe something else.  

Worth

The days tumble from out of your hands, as they always do when you think you've bought yourself infinity. Perhaps you're a little less stressed about it these days. Maybe in the back of your mind somewhere you are making peace with yourself about your incessant imperfection. 

Maybe in the back of your mind somewhere you're starting to think perfection 
wasn't the right goal, anyway. 

You hike to the top of Glastonbury Tor, watch the English countryside spread out around you. There, the rolling hills, there, the lush hedgerows and stone cottaged villages, there the Bay and Wales behind it. Here, the land you've come to see, making itself known. The sun is bright, the sky blue, the breeze joyful. They hear your crumpled accent, ask where you're from, and you no longer worry about your crooked answers. It just is what it is. 

You long for your friends back home, in all your back homes, delight at the thought that you'll be seeing them soon again. There's a moment just before getting what you long for that is the sweetest thing in all the world, and lately it feels like you're living that moment over, and over, and over. 

Well, said Pooh, "what I like best," and then he had to stop 
and think. Because although eating honey was a very good thing 
to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it 
which was better than when you were, but he didn't know 
 what it was called. 

You know there will be fall again one day, 
there will be Darkness
and fear
and the unbearable lightness of 
no longer wanting to live

but it is not today. 

For a brief moment 
you are invincible,

and if this is the reward you get for
being alive

then alright.  

Prove

At some point it becomes too late to turn back, and you're signing the papers and moving ahead. It's not often you get the chance to prove yourself to yourself, and yet here you are, careening down the country roads in determination to accomplish something novel. 

Late last night, after the pub was closing and the proprietor gave you the day's artisan loaves for free, you found a hidden backroad back to your village where no one was driving. You floated home on your bicycle in the twilight, tipsy from the ales but heady mostly from the magic of summer evenings. 

How could I ever stop living life this way? How could I ever settle down and conform? 

The questions that seem so profound in winter
flutter away in the summer breeze. 

A moment of invincibility. 

Fair enough.  

Steel

Nerves of spaghetti, you tell her and feel it resonate into your leg muscles. Certain you've done difficult things before, you clench your teeth and vow to make it through this, too. It's not like you're going to war. Except, perhaps, against your own senses. 

It takes all day to construct a sentence. Takes all day to remember even your most shallow breaths. The noodles take up too much of your time, you've lost a whole life to the synapses sparking wildfires in your head. It's too sunny, too warm, to regret it now, but you know the sadness will catch up with you come fall. 

A whole life lost 
and to what? 

You promise yourself silently 

to at least appreciate when you get it

right.  

Wave

It's a perfect summer evening. The wind is gone, the sky clear blue again. Little clouds drift like lambs across the zenith, bathed in the warm glow of sunset. One day of sunshine and you forget all your worries, forget that you were ready to pack it in for winter and hope for another year. 

Humans are simple that way, you think. When all seems lost the storm abates, the fever breaks. You book a car. Convince yourself you'll figure out how to drive it when the time comes. 

There are fairies in the hedgerows, you just know it.  

You wonder how many years more you'll keep looking for another version of yourself in unknown fields.  

Wouldn't it just be easier to give in and accept the one you have? 

Wind

The gale sets in, blows clear through your head until you're not sure which way is up. You linger over coffee in the doorway while the panes bump against the 17th century stonework, think are we meant to do all this on our own? before the dogs bump you on their way out to bob for apples in the orchard. The forecast says easy-breezy days are over, you have time to panic before realizing that you're only a third of the way through your adventure, that August stretches ahead of you with promise of warm oceans and late nights, still. 

You think perhaps solitude draws the terrors out of you, takes them to the surface and gives them oxygen, but the truth is they're always there, isn't it? It's just in company there's no time to dissect them, to turn them over in your hand and try to get to the next step. Company is only a way to stave off the Darkness. 

But what does one do
with that?