Sighted

This time of year always forces me to turn inward, as if my mind feels it's somehow right, or appropriate, to mirror nature's decline as the calendar treads undeterred into the winter. The earth absorbs the summer's excess as it does every year. And so does my heart absorb the excess of the past months by closing up shop and barricading the windows. It must have heard of the tempest coming.

He left and I wondered why I invite such chaos into my life. How I can entertain such an hypocrisy. Of late when I head out into the wide world I take a suspicious glance upwards, for fear that I have become one of those upon whom the sky will cave in, by and by. Forgive me Father, for I have sinned. Sometimes I have this image of myself running through an abandoned salt flat, barren of anything, myself completely unencumbered headed into the unknowable future. When I come back down I think of Atlas and what it is to be burdened.

But I was lucky, and I got these words from Grandfather Z and he said, A day you don't laugh is a day wasted, and I carry them around like a sacred trust.

We save the seriousness for the battle, which is most of the time fought internally anyway. This life is more fragile than a feather and one can only but take it half-heartedly. If you squeeze to hard it will break.

I am thankful for you, Emily. So much so that there is absolutely no way I can describe the how or why with words. To try would be to make it cheap.