Moving on

I love seeing tiny children standing on their front lawn at dusk. They're still in school uniforms that hang on their bodies, waiting to be grown into and they move. They move in a totally different way to adults.

They move their bodies and mouths and hands with a freedom that adults in their steel suits and shackled routines can't understand anymore. They waggle arms and extend legs, and shout to the skies. They use trees as fairy homes, and bikes as magical chariots and rocks as currency, mud as meals.

It makes me wish for those long summer afternoons when we'd swing so high, and watch the ball rip across the blue zone, and use a fish bowl as a crystal ball for a game of gypsies. Playing hide and seek under the cars, calling the cat the king of the colony, and escaping the prison by jumping through sprinklers. Bringing home damp pinafores, shoes, socks, laces and tissues to hand over to the laundry, waiting for tomorrow on the trampoline, the new moonscape.

Self and ego

The assumption is that we know self. We know ourselves. We know our selfishness. We know our selflessness.

The assumption is we are a whole self, a half self, an empty, flat self.

These assumptions fail self.

The self is undefined, unindentified, and always in flux.

The 'self' isn't the correct definition for the experiences we choose to use as the model of interactions with other selves.

The assumption is in the use of 'I' for 'self'.

It is just ego in motion.

The night you didn’t show

I sat in the coffee shop for twenty minutes before it occurred to me to send you a message. You were probably just having trouble finding a park, or you lost a button getting dressed and had to sew it back on. Or you misplaced your keys. And it was dark outside, so maybe you missed the street sign. So I messaged you.

My coffee had arrived, and I stirred in sugar cubes until it went round like a whirlpool, and the cubes dissolved. And then added another and another just for good measure. Across from the counter sat a pair. They weren’t a couple, but they never shut up, except when one finished the other’s sentence. I was fairly sure they’d have kids. One day, anyway.

The barista had his teatowel tucked into his leather belt, and was laughing at his wife, who was wiping down tables, rearranging all the magazines. For all I knew they’d been married twenty years or twenty days.

My phone vibrated on the coffee table after twenty minutes, causing people to continue ignoring me.

“Sorry hun. I just got tickets to see Lilly Allen.”

I slapped the teaspoon down on the table, sending coffee sprays on my white shirt. I was fairly sure you were really sorry you weren’t sitting with me. I know you wanted to be here, drinking sub-standard coffee and comparing notes on life.

‘There’s one ‘L’ in Lily Allen.’

Was that passive aggressive enough?

I sat for a few minutes, before I sculled my now cold coffee. Then I sat for a few more minutes. Alone.

When I got to the counter, the barista waved his hands at me. ‘For your sad face, that is free’. I wasn’t sad. I had poked myself in the eye, didn’t he know? I put my money in the tips tin. Outside, I got in my car, and drove home quietly.

Inside the house was silent and dark and cool. Just like I left it: pristinely tidy, with fresh sheets and the teddy bear hidden away. I turned on the stereo, and there she was. Singing the only two words I could think when I thought about you.

I am not the same

I'm just not the same without you, and I never will be. I still miss you and reminisce about you everyday. I'm never quite over you: not when I stay awake or go to sleep. Everyday is one without you, and none of my joy or comfort is compensation, nor shared.

I am not the same. Do you remember the way it feels? If I close my eyes sometimes I pretend that I'm there again. My hair is like a twisted rope for fetching a prince and it's been an eternity since it was short. You only knew it that way. It draws sharp perspective on the passage of time, even if memories remain vivid like abstracts. The conflict is stretching the boundaries of my knowledge. I hid today.

I am not the same to you. I never shall be. I am not the soul mate, the eternal, the even constant. I am the change you hate, and you are the constant I adore. Some things never change. This doesn't change with geography, with the constant of time, the expansion of space, the people walking faster and faster, the phone connections, the minting of money, the coffee cups.

I am not the same without you. Do you see the tiny, thumping resistance in my heart to all I have chosen to embrace? I am altered by the reality, by the imaginary. I am altered by the little nest you made in my heart, and the mess you left when I severed the connection.

I am not the same. I am vulnerable.
I am not ashamed, but I am not the same.

The battle was lost with the war.

It's not often I would dare to sing your pretty praises. There is no wonder left in you. You merely exist trying to tap into an illusion that fits nicely with derision muttered from acid tongues and laughing cheeks.

When you leave me (and you will), you'll leave with nothing more than the fragments of a shattered little dream and I shall go on, nursing a vessel that beat steadily to a rhythm you couldn't manage, no matter how many gulps of drink you took.

It was your ignorance for my existence, your lack of perception, the eyes you laid on others, the inabilty to think and feel and grow. You wilted me in your efforts, or your lack of efforts. The moments that cannot be redeemed no matter what soldiers and beggars you send my way.

Perhaps I am bitter, unstuck and prepared to take a tumble rather than root down and brave you. Perhaps, it really doesn't matter anymore.

For anyone with knowledge of the depths of the heart will surely know that time wounds all heals, and perceptively, nothing cures the broken like slow, patient, fresh love and still warm baked treats.

Commitment

Up above, preening and grooming in a cascade of deep green leaves, the birds were almost clicking with excitement. I liked to watch them, their skinny yellow legs. The sun was half falling on my face. There was an arm under my neck and insects tickling my shins. I was sure babies were staring from mother's laps.

Not even lobsters could get in the way of an answered question.

Palm Lines

There's something amazingly victorious about when your hand goes limp, stops fighting mine as it swirls towards your belly button. The conceding of my victory. I'm nearly always sure that you'll give in, stop fighting me after awhile and leave me free to roam, and the protesting hand will fall away. It is a jolting, beautiful relief to the tenseness normally reserved, the small balls we make of our hands.

Guiding hands is never the same. Well some hands. They don't understand patterns and motion and gentleness, and they ruin the intention in their unsteady tremors. They lose track and not even rough pulling can make them curl their fingers into the right shape. They are taken away from the overall picture.

Hands navigate shapes. Curves, corners, grooves and points - dips and crevices and tiny ledges. The barely perceptable raises from something smooth. The parallel lines inscribed across the thick raises of blood tunnels that were put there by angry hands, those that navigated mental discontent in physical perspective. Soothing hands try to run over them.

In the depths, coated and salty, hands experience, protect and nurture the textures of cleaning and sweeping and immersing and changing.