I Think This Is My Stop

this very day

blue and white

love

This morning when I woke up my first thought was, "Okay. The train has finally come to a complete stop. Time to step off and resume my regular life."

Whatever that means. One of the things I saw with inescapable clarity while traveling is that I am a truly haunted person and I need to find some meaningful work or creative expression to keep me from sliding inextricably into sadness. But in order to do that, I have to get inspired. Whatever that means.

Maybe the trick is to begin the work and go through the motions and hope the inspiration kicks in. I have a few ideas. We'll see.

And I have a very substantial "to-do" list.

In a dream long ago, a friend of mine who had recently died came and kissed me on the forehead, leaving a tiny triangle of light there. After a while the little mark of light faded from view but I could still feel it shining from within.

"You've been blessed," someone said, when I told her this dream shortly afterwards. She did not doubt the reality of such visitations.

I've had similar dreams since, the incarnations of people I have loved who felt very real but vanished when I awoke, and I wish I could believe in them as more than the response of the subconscious mind to yearning.

So speaking of yearning, it turns out that I'm listening at this very moment to a song by Andrew Bird from his new album, Things Are Really Great Here, Sort Of.

The song (by the Handsome Family, I think) is called "My Sister's Tiny Hands" and it's hauntingly beautiful, although it's about the tragic death of a beloved sister ("we were born like tangled vine") who stumbles in the briar while picking sour apples and is fatally bitten by a snake:

But still I heard her laughing /n those wild waving grasses/Still her tiny hands went splashing/ At the river's sparkling shore…

The teller of this story is so bereft and tormented that he takes to drinking and sets the woods ablaze and chokes up the river with stones, but of course he's never free. And in my own quietly music-less and not-inclined-to-drink-and-burn-things way, I can relate. My past casts a big shadow.

I didn't understand how long life was. Or how short. I wonder if I will live on in anyone's head the way certain people inhabit mine.

But I'm so tired of looking back. I wish I could feel absolved and at peace, free to be silly and happy and here.

It's the first day of summer. Here and there a silvery slice of coastal fog is filtering the hazy light, and it's strangely quiet but for occasional bits of bird chatter.I'm beginning with a walk.