July 4

After the family leaves, the sudden cognizance of distances, of miles untended. & the house’s new quiet, tempered by the having-been. The floorboards I didn’t hear in their creaking, the wind in its rustling, Willa sighing & looking towards the door. My remoteness less a conceptual thing now, more tangible in me. The lines on the map sinews stretched taut, arteries ushering blood from me & sending it away, away, some gift unbidden. & with that, the textured memory of how I came to be where I am. Something about seeing my family conjures my life entire & seems to flush my heart with some longing after irrecuperable years. I think on childhood in no particular way, am ghosted by remembering & feel that fell, that odd confluence of loss & warmth & sentiment that demarcates for me the passage of time, causes a swelling in my breast, underquiets each word. As if some rend in the familiar continuum through which that wake must run, from which the mind & heart can eddy unto a calmer shore. & it’s not that recollection is anything but beautiful—it is, always, whatever its shifting focus—just that somehow there is yet that child in me that wonders desperately at time’s erosions every time I see them anew, & can find in that wondering no sufficient logic to explain what tolls time exacts. With my family I still seem to myself something other than this adult I am. I am newly perplexed with myself, more so than usual, & find only slow reprieve from that renewed befuddlement. & how curious a thing, that.

So back into the texture of dailiness, with that love lingering around me yet. The house a warmer place for it, though, ever.

Comments

Anonymous said…
deep, full breaths...feel the life force fill your lungs, your entire being. you are loved deeply by many & right where you are supposed to be.
July 5, 2010 at 9:18 AM
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