Bluer Than Blue

It was about 4:30 in the afternoon on the 25th of May. I was walking down the hall when I'd turned to glance at the eastern window, through which you can see the shadow of the earth at dusk. Whatever it was that had caught my eye, there was no sign of evening yet. The sun was still high and bright, the sky was clear, and I realized I would rather be outside. I change my trajectory, turn around and go. 

Out in front, the older boys are washing their car, faint radio thrum as they each polish a side. Around the back, fleecy clouds are just beginning to rise. My youngest, in his last spring as a pre-teen, is occupying himself with characteristic self-possession. He experimentally spins in circles because he's just learned that, quote, "dizziness is fab." 

I make my way to the sunlit grass at the very back of the yard and pause for a moment. There is nothing unusual to see here, it's the same as it's always been, but then the feeling comes over me, the layering of time. It's a most remarkable effect. I take a seat on one of the ancient rocks that jut out of the ground, and notice. If I wasn't chatting with my own child and managed to overlook my aches and pains, I could easily convince myself that it was 40 years ago. Something about the air, the scent of the grass, the quality of light lifts the years away, leaving me free of the weight of age and knowledge. And yet, I know it is there. In that space between is something else, and I ponder it, despite not having the words.

My son, satisfactorily dizzy now, is singing a heartfelt song to the cat, because it's just that sort of day. We've all of us got a touch of spring fever, I guess. I turn my attention to the aged wooden posts holding up the clothesline - they might not be quite as old as the rock I'm sitting on, but getting up there. I notice one of them has a smear of blue paint on it, a smudged handprint maybe, even though there is nothing else here painted that shade. A story that I'd likely never know. The smudge resembled a map of an unknown place, and did not quite match the sky, even though they were both very, very blue. I sat there and let the feelings run through me, the weight of time and also the non-weight of it. 

Up above the paint-smudged post and the cross-piece where the rain-gauge has lived all my life, I can see the faint crescent of the daylight moon. Her horns are tilted downward, the way my great auntie used to say would spill out the rain. And she was right, of course, but at this moment, the clarity of the sky is striking. 

I think, life without you is gonna be bluer than blue, and I feel the sorrow that is the silent partner of time, the counterweight of earthly happiness. I never really imagined leaving Texas, but the feeling in the pit of my stomach tells me it's already past time to go. I tell the limestone and the prickly pear and the twisted chapote persimmon that I'm sorry, but the landscape only shrugs a little. It already knows the score. 

My youngest, done with his song now, skips back to the house. The older boys put up their polishing gear and murmur to each other as they walk away. The sun sinks just a bit lower. The wind begins to sigh. This moment - this one - in the sunlit grass will never come again. This moment is gone forever. 

If anyone else notices its passing, they give no indication. Like the tale of the blue map smudge on the clothesline post, only these traces remain.

λ = c⁄f ≈ 30 km

Maximum spectral energy. A time of rapid change. When things are too complicated to write, you must move on or be trapped in your unfinished words forever. Or you can let your pictures do the talking.

Grace

Her alibi

The Festival of Liminal Space

The Day of Deja Vu

Tunnel of Transfigured Time....

...and its sinister twin. (Click the hard-to-see play button)

The Haunted Correspondent

(...and his sinister(?) twin??)

Penumbrations. 

Picnic at Panther Canyon (In the manner of Joan Lindsay) 

In Yr Orbit. 

More to come, I'm sure. Now I'm going to sneakily back-date this to September as if I haven't missed two straight months of posting. 

When Flying Was Easy

Looking back, it seems like time was a place then, existing in space between the known and unknown. The distance between boundaries the same as the time it took for the new to become ordinary.

The sunlight that blazed down on the unfamiliar road is now lost to me, the sun and the road both. The sun and the road still exist, but the space they once occupied is gone.

Violet

On the corner of a village street, on top of the hill where the wind whirls and moans,  I feel memory twining around me like a nerve. It doesn't hurt to the touch, not really, just a little chill and a shiver, the presence of what is not-quite-forever-gone.

Taryn and me, coltish girls dancing around on the road above the canyon. Lip gloss, ruffles, Ralph Lauren plaid. The sky is violet, the full moon is cold. 

The memory is glossy and slick like hard candy. Watermelon, cherry, green apple scent. 

In my mind, we run home, laughing. From my perch, I can see Taryn through the window of her shop.  We are old now. And yet, and yet. 

Somewhere across the distant ocean, a clock chimes midnight. 

Time never really dies, does it? 

How Soon Is Now?

A cool night on the slide toward summer. Just unseasonable enough to be mistaken for fall. In brief moments like these, when the two seasons reveal themselves as the mirror twins they are, I always feel a bit uneasy, as if I'd mistaken dusk and dawn.

Which is how I'd come to be sitting in the dark, staring at the silent heavens and thinking about time. The air like chilly fingers creeping up my spine. 

An old memory comes drifting in from some far-off place - the first time I'd heard that song by the Smiths, and how it sounded not only like loneliness, but loss. 

It occurs to me now that the question in the title was never answered. 

Silence

Last night I dreamed about our house in Victoria. As often in my dreams, it was in a state of disrepair, dusty and abandoned, only resembling the real place in basic structure. It was an uneasy dream. My children were there, along with my step-son, but they were insubstantial, as if they'd been drained of their vital force. All their ages seemed wrong. In fact, everything about the house seemed wrong. 

From the hallway appeared my (now grown) son, but as the 8 year old he once was, an angelic, curly-haired boy. In his hands he held a gift tied with red ribbon. 

"On my birthday, I was silent" he said, unnervingly, before I woke.

Today the weather was the perfect sort we hope for all year: warm, but not too warm, dry, but not parched. Bright sun, soft breeze. I enjoyed it, despite the sickly dream haze lingering in the back of my mind. Why think of these things when the vanilla scent of the whitebrush is rising and the air is alive with bees? But sometimes a dream won't let go

It's not that I hadn't noticed the date. I had. The 4th of May. I'd seen it at midnight, even. Yet for some reason, it hadn't registered. 

"On my birthday, I was silent" says my eerie, angelic child. 

Suddenly, I remembered. It was the anniversary of the night we'd left Victoria, arriving here on the edge of a storm. And it's ironic that I'd forgotten, really, considering I'd titled the post about it "The Persistence Of Memory"

This bright day was nothing like the dismal drizzle of 8 years ago, though the feeling of uncertainty is the same. It has not escaped me that this time, the uncertainty belongs to everyone. For 8 years, I've been perched on the edge of this rock watching the world change, and now it finally seems to have caught up with me. 

It has also not escaped me that in the dream, my son was holding a gift. 

Not long ago, a friend who'd experienced a similar life upheaval around the same time said, "I feel like everything since then has been leading to this. Like I was made for this." 

I understood what she meant. This journey has been agonizing at times, yet here I am on the edge of this rock still, riding out these crises - national and international - in relative safety. To be doing so in Victoria doesn't even bear thinking about. For once, this unforgiving landscape holds me like a cradle while I wait to learn what needs to be done. 

In this post, I wrote about keeping the old key to the storage unit I'd rented back then as a sort of talisman. What I didn't mention was that the key is tied with a red ribbon. When I realized what the dream meant, the symbolism of the red ribbon on the gift box was immediately clear. 

Now that mourning the past is over, It's time to reclaim my autonomy.

The Turning of The Year

In that strange, blank time between Christmas and New Year's, my mind is often drawn back to the past to study the patterns that might affect the future.

This year, however, something seems different. As if soon the past will not matter so much, as if our timeline is diverging into something new.

I'm not the only one who feels this either. No one is sure exactly what it means, but we hope the turning of the year will be a fortunate one.

Best wishes and a happy New Year to you and yours.

Those Who Take Their Presence With Them, Those Who Leave It Behind

photo by Francesca Woodman

My friend and I were talking the other day about a girl we'd once known and loved. As a child, she'd seemed touched by magic, everyone around her felt touched by magic. I'd feel so bereft when she'd go away. Since we didn't see each other very often, it was my fate to be left behind.

The essence of this is distilled in dreams about her: we talk frenetically, tell half-understood stories, play confusing, yet fascinating games. The clock ticks in the background. There are months of things we want to tell, but there is never enough time. Her mother's voice calls from the distance, saying they have to go. Her real life is somewhere else, far away from mine. As always, I'm left with a vague notion of color and shadow, a memory where her presence once was. Nothing even as substantial as a ghost. Only an undefined longing fills the vacuum.

Childhood friendships can be mysterious, and I've long wondered about this ancient grief of mine. To this day, I'm not certain what I expected. I'm quite sure I was more attached to her than she ever was to me. Perhaps this was the source of the longing - underneath our apparent closeness in those days, I really knew who was loved the least. 

My friend considered this view, but ultimately disagreed.

He said, "It's just that she takes her presence with her when she goes. When she's gone, she's gone. Those kinds of people, there is an emptiness where they used to be.

'You, on the other hand, leave your presence behind."

It was immediately clear what he meant, though I'd never heard it put into words before. It was an intriguing idea. We thought through all the people we've known, whether their presence went with them or lingered. Despite the intangibility of a quality such as "presence", we were able to agree in every case as to who was which. We wondered at first if it was the type or strength of personality that made the difference, but no...there were similar types who fell into different categories, and exceedingly different ones who were the same. Nor did spirituality matter much - one very spiritual roommate left nary a trace of his living there, another had such a strong presence, even the years couldn't diminish it.

It's a nebulous, but distinctive phenomenon. Your beloved is not with you, you are totally alone.

Your beloved is not with you, yet some sense of  them remains. 

I wondered if missing someone more acutely contributed to the perception of absence. Again, my friend disagreed. To him, feeling the absent person's presence made missing them more difficult, a constant reminder that they really were gone. Plus, he pointed out, there are some people who drastically improve the mood in a room just by leaving it. Well, I certainly can't disagree with that.

To me, though, the absolute feeling of absence seems utterly lonely, haunted by longing. As if I might recapture something important if only I could find a trace of that person, somewhere, around some far corner. A sign or signal drifting on the breeze.

This last is how it seemed to me with the girl we'd once known and loved. Years later, when we were grown and living in the same town, I would catch hints of her presence. On the sidewalk, through a shop window, in the echoes of a stairway where she had just been and gone. Not much had changed, really...the ticking clock had been set in motion long ago. The mysteries of our friendship were never to be solved; ultimately, there is little point in loving someone who must always leave you. Instead, I learned to love the traces of her presence for the brief moments they remained, like little whirlwinds, so many vaporous wisps, so many childhood  ghosts.