Past Lives

It's beginning to feel like it did. 

That time when I thought I could create a life for myself that would feel right, when I looked at the tracks behind me and liked where they'd walked. All the good things came when I was there, it's not lost on me. 

I am worse for the wear now, the telltale signs of having been raked across the coals crisscross my skin, singe my hair. But I looked in the mirror the other day, the one little mirror in this cabin whose other reflections are all of the mind, and I saw the glint in my eye returned. Recognized it like a dear old friend. 

The stars across the Montana sky are unending, twinkling into the silent night like it's not their job to find any answers, only keep you company while you do. 

For the first time in a long time, you feel like that is exactly enough.

burn

Another day, another struggle, they align on the horizon like patient orphans, waiting for a meal. I sit at the computer, trying to tell stories, but all that comes out is my own inadequacies: I am never enough. 

Back at the drawing board on the porch, I read old books and begin to see new patterns. How everything we do is a muscle to contract, and when the muscle is out of use, we must start from the beginning again. Fewer reps, lower weights, longer breaks. Breathe. A little stretching, a little more fun and games. It wasn't meant to make you cry, only to prove to yourself a little more of what you can do. 

Only to remind yourself how sweet it is to feel your muscles ache,
knowing you have used them for something good.

Just Wait

Four years of photographs scroll past your eyes, a backup too long awaited, a process at once painfully slow and pleasantly meditative. This is a life, you think, and you don't know what to make of it. Was it all you had hoped?

Of course not. Lives never are.

I take a break by going outside to sit under the night sky, only to find it overcast, only the big dipper shining steadily at the top of the mountain ridge. You fear you are squandering your days, your year, your life, but you do not yet know how to catch back up. The to do-lists are tempting, a fall back when all else fails you, but you wonder if the things you need to do can really be described in bullet points. The starry night sky last night seemed to have something else to say, and now it is cloaked in mystery, the whole thing seems to be on purpose. 

You remain in stillness, listening for sounds from the meadow, sounds from the woods, but hear nothing. The only sound is whatever is creaking in the attic. Your ears are ringing with the silence, a constant stream rushing past your ear drum. It occurs to you that you do not actually understand how sound works. 

It occurs to you that you do not actually know how very many things at all work. 

There, that's a good start, says the night sky. Now we are on our way.

Fenomena

I stay up too late, and lie lingering in the log bed until long after the first sun rays reach the thousand-piece puzzle outside the door. The birds on the roof sound more like bear cubs by the day, tumbling around and discovering their limbs in ways that are cuter at a distance. So many things are cuter at a distance, you think, but it's a thought that passes by without much engagement. 

In the country, unwanted thougths have a way of drifting off with the breeze across the meadows. 

A new story begins telling itself to you, quietly at first, like it's afraid your shop's no longer open for visitors, like it's afraid your ship has already sailed to more reasonable shores. You want to tell it you are not dangerous, but yelling from a distance rarely gives that impression, so you sit still, instead, and wait for it to approach. The woods are full of stories, you remember now, the woods are where rocks come alive and dangers lurk in soft moss, you grew up in these woods and that's why your people became storytellers to begin with.

We had to make sense of the shadows that follow us, the sounds from the attic, for a thousand years we have had to make our own light in the dark because the winters are long and unforgiving. I'm not saying it happens without struggle. 

I'm just saying if you sit still and watch it, the forest will let you know what you don't.

Tap

By evening, the skin across my back stretches in sunburn, not displeased. I guide the car into a dirt road off incomplete directions, we climb into the mountain only to be stopped by a hundred black cows, scowling at me in the road. At the top of the mountain, valleys stretch before me in all directions. I do not know how to capture it. 

Later, underneath a sky made bright by starlight, I think the same again. Here it is, the endless sky I’ve been waiting for. 

Here it is, the adventure i so nearly thought I could not give myself again. 

All the things that are to come

will come. 

Not on your schedule, 

but the right one. 

Drown

Wake with a headache, like an unearned hangover dragging you out of increasingly strange dreams. The country night takes its tithing. Let the morning sunlight trickle across the thistles outside while the coffee brings me round again, the cabin now touched at every corner by the writer's messy madness. People are like goldfish, they grow to the size of their bowl, he wrote on a napkin at the subway station, new years eve turned to day in 2007, one day before you left New York for the first time. 

(That was the worst time. It got easier, as you did it again. And this last time was the easiest, because you didn't really leave it at all. You think your greatest gift was having your cake and eating it, too, it doesn't come without sacrifice, but it's not a bad way to build a life.)

I sat for hours watching the sun set over pineclad mountainsides tonight, watched the light linger on its green velvet, like quiet waves in the wilderness, the deer walked by me like I didn't exist and I thought, good, I am becoming one with this log cabin. When at last it realized its mistake and leapt away, I went back into the little house, looked at the piles of words scattered across the couches, the tables, the floor. I grew into this bowl, like a heavy-handed metaphor for growing into this life I'm building. It's a strange, messy collection of abandoned trinkets and well-loved but crumpled pieces of paper. It's a shambled mosaic and a trip without destination, but I think I am on the right track, on the right highway though I don't know where it goes, and when I find out,
oh all this mess
will make sense, 

will seem like a perfectly executed
plan.

Muscles

As the noise in your brain quiets, it gets easier to hear the smaller voices. Perhaps they have been speaking all along, but without making such a fuss about it. You wish they had. 

They whisper of muscles unused, of why you do not crave things because the electricity has gone out of your system, because the tension grows weak with neglect. You forget you wanted things, forget you expected things, now their absence lines up like a firing squad, like a bad guilt trip without retribution. There's an ore of truth there, something is longing to be said. 

You have reached the abandoned mine. 

Pray for a rush to return.