PonderEthereal

I sipped my coffee. Ethan whirled into the room, giggling, followed in seconds by a playful dog and out the other side they whirled again.

It was still drizzling outside. Every now and then the wind would whip through the tree tops and the chimes outside the window would sound. I shivered and wrapped my hands closer around the hot mug, glancing at the stove. The muffins were almost done. My stomach growled in response.

And then I saw her. I wasn’t quite sure what I saw at first. I reached forward across the table, with my sweater pulled over my hand and wiped at the fog on the window. Yes… there she was. Dark hair, mussed, draped in shabby clothing that looked gray with dust. But despite the dust or the drizzle outside, she held herself as thought she were taking a stroll in the sunshine down m tree lined street.…

… have hearts that beat and eyes that blink.
They have big impact on lots of people without meaning to or knowing how.
They could pour out their deepest, darkest secrets and still maintain a type of effortless innocence that can’t be learned.
They can make you breathe a little faster because something in you knows they have a purpose and that they mean something.

that breath halting moment
away from the moment
that fly off occurs
from landing of butterflies.
Beauty so deeply,
breathtaking, so quickly.
A sideways askew view
of realness is sinking
and layers dismissing
themselves away softly
to leave something delicate,
something mistakenly left out by chance.

If I could tell you something you need to know about me it’s that …
If I could say what I really mean to say, it would be that …
I see so much in you, like…
There is something I know for sure. That is…
If I could tell you the one thing I never got a chance to say it’s that I …

If there were a way to surmount it. The necessity of being careful. The knowledge that anything gently meant and lovingly placed, said too fast, to soon, to loudly, without the proper steps, isn’t heard as loving or gentle. So it stays in careful places like between the lines, in quiet looks, behind a laugh, in days of silence, in moments of tension, beyond the meaning. It’s all there, carefully kept and one day, in a month, in a year, in ten years, in a hundred, it will have…

He whines when I am out of his sight talking to someone and not spending time with him.

If I don’t keep my eyes on him, he runs off and copulates with every bitch he can catch up to.

He’s pretty aggressive with men in his territory.

My friends tolerate him and some of them like him.

He gets snugly and playful though and then I forgive him because I love him.

But he’s a dog and that’s what dogs do.

Do you believe in love at first sight?
Do you believe you can be in love more than once in a lifetime?
Do you believe it’s possible to grow to love someone you didn’t choose?
Do you believe you can love more than one people at a time and not detract from the others?
Do you believe it’s possible to love and not like?
Do you believe that if you love something, let it go and it comes back to you, its yours forever?

I guess if you’ve never really experienced love, you might think love had something to do with belief.

“Can I spend the night?”, I asked. “Of course.. come for the weekend.” And so I packed the pup into the car and drove down. On this night, I sat up until midnight in the living room with the girls. Twas the night before Christmas. They decorated the tree, I fussed with their laptop, making it run right and I checked on mine regularly. We listened to Christmas carols and kept Tobi from peeing on everything in sight.

Eventually, we called it and I went to snuggle up in bed. I laid back with my book and began to read. But without the hubub of voices and motion around me, it began to happen… they began to leak into the sides, the edges, around corners. Thoughts, memories, questions… and finally tears.

My family wasn’t there with me. Ethan was with his dad and along with my ex, his parents, aunts,…

A cool presence that tingles across my awareness, playing at my boundaries, rolling across my thoughts. Echos I’m not supposed to hear, everything that’s wrong to feel. Like a child at play. Don’t touch it. Be careful. Be gentle. Repeated over and over. It’s ok. It’s ok. It’s ok. I swear, it’ll all be ok. Maybe it’s midnight that makes me feel this way. But midnight never felt that way before.

There were monkeys and clowns and the flying trapeze. All were elaborately announced by the man with the big shiny smile. Look at me, not the actors in the wings, his teeth cried out between his words.

“Is it done yet, momma?” Ethan whispered to me.

There were motorcycles, juggling, contortionists. There were lions and magic tricks, rabbits from hats. An extravagant, somewhat tainted reality marched by on the wave of organ music piped out of pumping tubes, panting it’s broken laughter into the night.

“Not quiet yet. We must wait for all of the clowns to be done.” I picked his hand up between mine and we watched in silence.

There were gymnasts and fire eaters and tamed Tigers. There were hula hoops and throwing knives and freaks of nature. The man with the big shiny smile gestured elaborately at the shadow of things which might be magnificent if you took his…

excerpted form a larger piece

The benefit of being able to tell this story in retrospect is that everything unfolds reasonably, in order and foreshadowing can occur. If only there had been a narrator present at the moment I decided to go to the beach. He would have leaned in in his movie traitor voice and said something like “A girl, The Gods, A beach. A life at the brink of destruction. Who knew that five simple minutes and a scream to the goddess of destruction and recreation could destroy everything.”

But nay. At the time, I had no idea and it wasn’t until a few days later, sitting on a bench at the courthouse that I would comment on how horribly serendipitously everything unfolded and realize that truly there was a divine hand involved.

So it was entirely obliviously and unthinking that one fateful Monday evening, I went to the…