Why are we shocked when it happens or when someone mentions they’re in the waiting room of death?
This continual state of being busy allows us to pretend there’s more to existence and the dash is eternal. Nous nous berçons de rêves.
The fledgling breeds a new beginning but what awaits is an end. The earth survives in beginnings and endings. It recycles life. Some say mother births us but it can’t survive without its seedlings. We exhale, she inhales, an endless repatriation that benefits none but the giver.
What’s the difference between a cynic and a realist? “Blurred lines”. 🙂
too late to dream, to dance, to wish, to plan and become?
Is it when you’re married, have kids, graduate, accomplish all you set out to do in life or is it at the twilight of your career as you sigh into retirement?
When did you stop wanting and dreaming? Was there a punctuated space where it all stopped and you drifted away or emerged into everything and nothing at all?
Most times I am still me, the dreamer, the writer, the aspiring traveler, the polyglot, the ristaker but sometimes, in the midst of the swirling paths in my mind, is there a time when it will be too late?
The becoming is within. The ending is in their eyes, their stares, their ideas, their desires, them.
We stop where they begin.
Sometimes we begin where they stop, time unravels and births another you, more than you but a we, an us.
I look back often, sort of living in reverse. I reach out to the young girl I used to be whom I loved.
I try to find when my life stopped, where, when or how I lost that girl I used to be.i can’t answer why if I don’t know where we split. She s so much more than a memory. She’s neither within nor in the periphery of my everyday. Did she birth me or did I outgrow her? How?
The 51st summer but I’m stuck at one. Life repurposed us. Is it of any consequence that I too had a say in it or did I? Every hour, every minute and every second counts but the culmination speaks volume.
What do I make of time?
I don’t want it to get away from me anymore. Thus each breath, each minute, second and moment is a lifetime.
I can’t repurpose trauma. It clings. It lingers. It gives me an air of strength.
“When last you felt loved,romantically,” he asked?
“Is that really a question,”I have been loved, have I not?” I wondered.
I could not readily answer him however. As logical as I believe myself to me, when it comes to romance I held on to feelings and moments. I did not ever define love in a way I could easily express to myself or any other.
In this decade of my existence when I am focused on being fully present physically, spiritually and emotionally, this set me mining my past flings, indiscretions and relationships.
“What is love?”
“How do I know someone loves me?”
Though I understand love is more than feelings, the acts of love I took somewhat for granted. It is not to say I took love for granted or someone’s gestures as a matter of fact but more so I did not fully take them in.
“When last you felt loved my dear?” He left me reeling.
I went back to the first time I could think someone made me feel loved. “Ne'”was the one. He was love to me, in the things we did, in who he was and how he cared for me. The way he wanted me and told the world about it. That man would skate from the Bronx to Brooklyn to see me just because. He would cook for me and support my dreams. He just was.
I now can say I felt loved when he: would be himself around me, no pretense, when he would share his goals and his dreams with me, making himself vulnerable. He loved me when he would rush from work to pick me up, make weekend plans where he would open worlds unknown to me.
Harlem was our playground, our shared joy in the creatives, music, live venues and our friends. He was everything I read about as a teen in all the romance novels I used to devour.
He was romance.
He was passion.
He was burning wanting and wild sex.
He was joy.
He was laughter.
He was transparency.
He was honesty.
He was dancing in the rain after a date.
He was eating ice cream in the rain.
He was playing hide and seek in the sea.
He was climbing the mounts of iceland and swimming in the caves.
He was me dancing like a fool when he was not into it and him looking at me like “that’s my girl, crazy and all but I love her” without shame and allowing me to be.
He was the guy who would see something needed doing and do it without me asking.
He took me as I was, as I am.
He was happy, proud to be with me. I was not his secret.
He was everything.
Even decades later after we had settled, settled into what the world thought love was and should be, we would reconnect and there would always be the underlying vibrancy of that moment in time.
Delving into the past I can admit that deep down I spent my life looking for a love like this, another him maybe, someone who embodied all he was, unbeknownst to him and to myself truthfully.
I am loved when there is vulnerability, openness, quality time, shared passions, laughter, support and a very strong desire to be near each other and with each other.
It’s been eons. They say it is better to have loved and never loved at all, I disagree. It is better to have been loved than to never have known love. I am better, my existence has meaning because I got to be loved by you.
And if ever there was a love I am glad I got to experience and lived, it was you.
You were worth this life and all it has turned out to be.
I like wild things and wild men. The first phase: wild and dumb. The next: wild and smart. Neither lasted long but the cultivated and meek.
As if meek was an insult.
The gentleness soothes, weightless, peaceful but it doesn’t last. They don’t last.
The wild streak jauntily awakens at the dawn of chance and change. It leads to pathways of freedom and demureness be damned. As am I. As I am. The difference is feelings. Feeling alive, not just breathing or existing. After all that’s why we’re here for, to emote, to feel. Breathe. Exhale. Life is not in a breath, the soul of existence. Wildness is taste, visibility and touch. How we touch! We touched time. We felt space. Wrapped in feelings of being. I like wild. I like wild things. Wild thoughts. Wild people. Wild kind. You.
PS: I can’t stop thinking about you. It’s always been you.
“Wilderness is a place where the wild potential is fully expressed, a diversity of living and nonliving beings flourishing according to their own sorts of order. To speak of wilderness is to speak of wholeness. Wilderness may temporary dwindle but wildness won’t go away”. Gary Snyder
Life between the lines 
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