this time of year
November 4th, 2009
The days grow short, the night overtakes, and my heart aches for the loss of you.
It’s always early November when I miss you the most.
Not the summers, even though we filled them with love and laughter, snow cones and shrimp. Not the holidays, when we were together more. But the slow increase of darkness always brings a slow increase of memory, and with it, the pang of absence.
I often wonder what you’d think of me now, in my wacky freaky life, but in my heart I know. I can feel you in the wind, loving me from beyond.
I love you, too.
haunted
November 3rd, 2009
In the dark, in the quiet, in the silence.
Only then can I hear you. Like the wind whipping around me, I can hear you; a roar in the storm, a whisper in the silence. And the hearing of you brings memories, distant like the night sky. Looking up, the stars overwhelm me, tiny beads of light against the darkness of my heart.
You haunt me, and o how I long to be haunted. Such delicious delirious torment.
dark and twinkling
November 2nd, 2009
After leaving the insane asylum, Nathan needed coffee.
He drove across town, the ghosts of what he’d seen haunting him, cloying and disturbing. He shivered and cranked the heater, and wished the sun wasn’t setting so fast. The echos of tormented screams bounded across his mind, but far worse were the whispers.
Those tiny little voices, hidden in the cracks of his memory.
The eyes of that one girl, so dark. Twinkling, in spite of everything.
The crooked smile she offered him.
The way she spoke his name… as though… she knew him.
Wait, how had she known his name?
He shook his head, parking in the café parking lot. He threw open his door and took a deep breath of the cold, crisp air. Shivering, he ducked into the café and went to the barista. “Coffee, black,” he ordered.
“Yes, Nathan,” she said, and met his gaze with eerily familiar eyes… twinkling and dark.
the new day
November 1st, 2009
Day births, growing brighter by the moment. The sunlight kisses my eyes, and I open them. I stretch and linger in the warmth of bed, taking deep slow breaths that fill my lungs and recharge my spirit, reconnecting to my body and my Goddess.
Eventually, I rise and don long stripy socks. The chill air wraps around me as I open the back door and step out into the morning. The sun makes stripes on the cool cement, and I move so my stripes align. The synchronicity brings me joy.
I sing a greeting to the day. I gently lower myself into the swing. I watch the breeze and the tall grasses dance.
I am ready.
this night
October 31st, 2009
Slowly, I slip my ring off my finger, my heart racing. I look into her eyes and be overwhelmed with love and desire. I inhale deeply and look at my bare hand, a growing sense of clarity washing over me.
Crouching, I run my fingers through the earth at my feet, then I stretch up and wiggle my fingers at the sky. Earth and Air, Fire in my heart, Water on my cheeks. This night, I feel Spirit all around me, swirling and rushing. Ancestors and decedents and departed loved ones moving across the veil, loving and blessing and sharing in the magick.
I link hands with my love, and know we can now move forward without the past.
railroad rain
September 12th, 2009
The train long since passed, the barricades still down, red lights still blinking their warnings. We sit in the car, wipers off, watching the rain stream down the windshield, holding hands in a comfortable silence.
A car, impatient or bored or brave, zooms past, weaving through the bars. This sparks a chain of rebellion, and soon we are alone, together, at the tracks.
The rain pours, tap-tap-trickle down our windows. We talk, we kiss, we hold hands and keep still. We marvel at the booms of thunder, we gasp at the flash of lightening.
Bliss. Here, with you in our car at the railroad tracks, my heart is full.
supposed to be
August 8th, 2009
How far along are you supposed to be?
I am supposed to be nine weeks…
She was supposed to be nine weeks…
She was supposed to be born in August.
I was supposed to hold her, nourish her, raise her.
I was supposed to be…
endless brown
July 16th, 2009
rain.
The summer stretches on for months, chasing the rain and the beauty and the color from the world. Everywhere I go, it’s hot and dry and brown. My desk is brown, my purse is brown, my wallet is brown, even my new bowl is brown. My hair is brown. The grass is brown, the trees are brown, the birds and the bugs and the ground is brown. Our fence, brown. My plants? Brown.
Too much brown, endless shades of brown the color of no rain.
333
July 12th, 2009
I’m going to live to be 333.
I say it with such certainty that I get raised eyebrows. After all, such a long life isn’t yet common to my people. We typically fade out at 80 or so.
But I know when I’ll die. I can see it.
It’s October 31st, 2310. I’m sitting in a big comfy chair, a sweet fruity drink in hand, regaling yet another generation of my great (to some degree; I’ve lost count) grandchildren with the great stories of my life. I’ve reached my end and I can feel it, but I face it unafraid, ready.
I stop mid-sentence, laughter on my lips as my last breath leaves me. Perfect.
the new trend
July 9th, 2009
She watched me from across the store as I dispelled the boy hitting on me with ease. Her perfectly made-up face made a face and she pretended to examine her fingernails, but I knew she was burning to talk to me.
I went to her, complimented her hair, gave her the opportunity to talk to me. She took it. “How did you get him to leave you alone so easily?” Her voice, tinged with upper-class sarcasm, trembled. I looked at her, my pierced eyebrow raised.
“I told him I’m gay.”
To my amusement, she flinched. “Oh.” She looked me over, I stood my ground. Her manicured nails tapped on her pressed pants, held in place by a belt that probably cost a month of my salary at the coffee shop, with a perfectly pressed shirt tucked perfectly therein. She hesitated. “Are you?”
I took a defiant step closer to her. “I am.” To her credit, she didn’t back away – though she clearly wanted to.
“Do you think it would work… if you weren’t?”
I laughed. “Sure, if I was good enough at pretending. It’s gotta come across as real, or he’ll think I’m lying.”
She nodded. “Can I… take you to lunch? Will you teach me?”
Many hours later, yet another cute guy makes his approach. She deflects him easily, confidently, with a glimmer in her eye that I alone understand.
Weeks later, and it’s the new trend. All the uppity high-class girls are claiming lesbianism to fend off overzealous would-be suitors.
But then, something shifts. The pretending shifts. It becomes more than a game, it becomes reality. The girls slowly realize they are more than claiming, they are becoming. Hundreds of them over a period of weeks, then thousands. It becomes a global shift, and woman by the millions are coming out.
Men become largely unwanted. Over years, they become unneeded. We stop having sons, then stop bearing children in ways dangerous to our bodies. War ceases, communities grow, peace spreads. Women dismantle the patriarchal systems that rule over us, and shift into communal systems that allow power to spread, until every woman on the planet is important, empowered, known, loved.
Memories fade. Thoughts of the old ways die out with the last of the men. I look out over the world from my station high above and wonder at how far we’ve come… and wonder what we’ve lost.
