Together, Alone

Leaves skittering in the trees on a starlit walk home. Woke up feeling all broken promises and raw nerves; pulled sinews and sad reclusiveness. Bandied about like the threatening snow flakes on a November wind: “Is it time, am I meant to be here, what was I supposed to be doing?”

Sometimes, I miss my friends. The old ones I fell in love with at age ten, the ones who worried with me about getting into trouble, the ones that came paired with a mom you couldn’t avoid if you wanted to see them. I love the memory of those friends like the cat on my lap, and curl the soft spots around my fingers as the recollection purrs into life. Still feeling connected to girls from long ago, tied at the belly, while sharing experiences without each other, like turning on the same music miles apart. She’s there like a first love, pocketed away in tenderness, the little pains she may be feeling tingling down the wire to my own fingertips. Little mystery in a person I’ve been without for eight years. Happy to still know her, somewhere.

I don’t seem to want to make something so terribly dramatic anymore. More interested now in humanity’s communal, half-conscious struggle, the connectedness between our vastness - we’re all answering the question, one breath at a time, what is the meaning of life? How regular is existence, yet how fraught with possibilities. Potential, hope. I put hope in the hope of men. Pray we all embrace the help to fulfill those hopes, whenever it may find us. Choice, awareness. I choose the power of choice. Pray we all use this power, in self-fulfilling awareness, to better the life we are given.

Never alone, though skittering and rattling on boughs of our own making. Shaking in the wind that must touch us all, remembering the memory of ourselves, buried down deep in the sap of another. Blessed are the little mysteries we’re meant to learn from each other; happy we can all be, if we can forget to feel alone.