Mud Pies and Lullabies

She stares at the crinkled photograph,

her quavering fingers rubbing against the disintegrating surface,

nostalgically, painfully, very Aware.

The home she once lived in

raised beautiful children in

that belongs to someone else now, that is visibly changed now,

lives in the past, on a crinkled photograph, and

in the crinkled lines around her eyes and mouth, perhaps

in the gray hairs framing her face.

Closing her weary eyes, she imagines

a walk through that old hallway, into a small chalky white room

with the lines marking height on the door's frame

and the scuff marks in the floor from children's play.

She can almost see it in front of her. It is torture, this ghostly vision of a golden age

but the vision is tainted with What's Real. The walls

echo with silence, the paint smacks of newness.

There are no toys to be played with, no hair

to be tousled.

The children are grown and they've left now. There is a bitter taste

in her mouth.

There's a blank space in her head, a small chunk of her memory and personality gone, and she picks at it with her musings and music, wanting and not wanting to know what was once there. She can't remember why it happened, and she has a gut feeling that she doesn't want to - that instead she should just barrel forward with her life and worry about the past later, and from a safely distant vantage point - but she also wants to embrace the unknown. This is the same tendancy that forces her to climb heights that frighten and read books knowing she'll have nightmares, a slightly massochistic trait.

The seat of the passenger van has crumbs of sand on it that are grinding into her skin. She does her best to ignore this.

She attempts sleep, but her eyes are feeling for the sky, constantly opening and searching the cloudy sapphire depths for answers. She secretly feels as if a certain wispy pattern will show her everything she's been looking for, alighting her imagination with thoughts of airborne wonders and impossibilities, but also explaining her life in a way that is gentle and simple.

A memory, a distraction, explodes into her conciousness, and for a moment she is wracked by indignation, fear, anger, and pain...but this is a regular thing, and just as she suspected, it passes, and it is just another second of recognition among many that have randomly gripped her for months now.

She can remember her last night on the beach: the waves were crooning with the voices of stones falling and leaves shaking, a sound that she could say with absolute certainty was the only tune that could penetrate straight to her heart. The brilliant yellow moon, hovering like a deity among insubstantial gray clouds and sharp stars, cast it's eerily irresistible glow out across the waters like a golden path laid out for the brave walker. She had gazed intently down it's length into the glowing darkness far beyond her sight, enchanted forever, and forever wondering what would happen if she followed it...surely death, but perhaps death was the ocean, and the ocean encompassed death, and those who were swallowed became a part of something majestic and enticing. The thought was tempting enough to draw her feet into the water and to toy with the meaning of true freedom.

The undertow tugged gently, knowing that the battle was already won, and that she would be back.

A Pink Glowing Lamp Post on a Snowy Day

Today there was a layer of snow draped elegantly over the world outside my window. Tufts of white spiraled from the cloudy sky, dancing onto the flurry-crowned flowerpots; bushes and tree limbs ached and groaned under heavy loads, bending almost double in an effort to rid themselves of the proof of winter's prowess. Somehow, all of this happened while I slept, transforming the world into something alien and beautiful and timeless -- and though the moment that sunlight hits ice to reflect into your soul is infinite, the chilly flakes will die quickly, and February will pass, and life will continue despite their absence. Despite my slumber, or their death, or my death, life will continue infinitely for a moment and then stretch forever, so far outreaching to extremes that a moment becomes completely negligible. A snow flake's life starts and ends so quickly; but within that consciousness, if there be such a thing blessed upon a crystallized whiff, was there a brief eternity? I think about my own life and the eventuality of death, and I feel as if I'll never end...but I also feel brief as well, stunted, already finished.

A snowflake is so small. Thousands have slapped my windshield with puny malice, a pitiful display of strength that is wiped away by a mechanical wiper. The particles that compose the frozen tendrils of water are smaller still; perhaps the amount of minuscule components tends towards infinity. And just as they are immeasurably small, so the universe is immeasurably gigantic. It is all so small and yet so big at the same time. Maybe that's what the true meaning of eternity is; existing in a moment, being small and mortal and alone, and yet in that moment also being joined by the grand multitude of the universe, magnificent and endless.