The Summer of Irrevocable Change

 

It is here. 

Blue Redux/Chapter 24

Tuesday, the 27th of June. Again, the brightness of the sky draws me outside. The heat this time is stunning.

It's a little more than a month since the day of the blue paint and crescent moon, though the sense of layered time remains. Even if the air feels on fire, the sunlit grass and the shadows are the same. 

Out front though, the yard is empty. Around back, everything is still. In this space is absence, as solid as the heat. There is no longer any sign of laughter or murmured conversation. Cicada drone is the only sound. 

I sit down on the same rock as I'd done before, feeling as curiously old/young as I had in May. The emptiness of the place runs though me now, draining into the hollow ground. It's that sensation you get when the party is over, the guests have left, the visitors have had to go. I know this absence is the price I pay for moving on. My mother has said she never wants to see me again, and the current me, the chronological one, is resigned to this, knowing there was nothing else to be expected, though I worry a bit about child me, who was always so desperate to please. Child me is surprisingly stoic, however. It turns out, like the limestone and the prickly pear and the twisted chapote persimmon, she already knew the score. 

The sun is searing, blisteringly hot. It's the hottest June on record, they say. I get up, seek some cover among the trees. I pluck flowers from the whitebrush and desert willow to save, because they don't have them where I'm going. I occurs to me that I am trying to fold Texas away, put it in a box like a keepsake, knowing that in a years' time it might mean something more to me, but it just as likely won't mean a thing. 

Over top the clothesline again I see the daylight moon. It has grown from the thin crescent of 25th May, dwindled and grown again into a fat waxing gibbous. In recent days the boys have been increasingly restless, the grown-up ones wanting to get on with the rest of their lives, the younger one impatient to be somewhere else. After years of stasis, things had suddenly begun to move. Action brings good fortune, so the I Ching and Pink Floyd say, and perhaps this is true; in fact, I'd say it almost certainly is, as inaction has done us the exact opposite. But for every action taken there is a world left behind, and this, I think, is what I am looking at now. 

Absence of presence as presentiment. The empty space where we used to be.

It's a melancholy feeling, to be sure. 

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But let us allow hexagram 24 to have its say. It is advantageous to have a direction to go.