I like Birds

 

 

I like birds, and Walt, and Whit, and Whitman. I like kindred spirits- especially when found between the lines of Ann of Green Gables, they're my favorites if I haven't mentioned. I like books, and crushing looks, like the ones in “silly” fables. I like the strings at the end of my sleeves and tugging on them with my fingers. I like standing still on sidewalks before the light turns green, I sway and sing, to the pedometer of cars driving, and passing, and honking, and creeping.

I like wind that pushes my hair into my face, even on good hair days, because it takes me back to better days, and better ways, before I found out about the other. I like seeing kids do weird things at the store, while their mothers look bored, and when we smile at one another, I know we know something their mothers forgot because they were taught to forget along the way. So I say hey to the kid who says he’s a vegetable. And I laugh when his head becomes a bed of cucumbers and lettuce as he leans under the spraying water in the produce section. And when he’s pushed away by the bored pilot of his cart, his lettuce head bobbing down the aisles, I remember to remember to laugh at my kid when he does the same thing.

I like twelve o’clock when the sun meets me at my window, and the thirty minutes or so it takes it to pass. I like imagining strawberries growing in snow, because it’s unusually beautiful the white against red, and maybe it’s just all up in my head, but it seems it should happen as so.  I like kicking acorns down the road, and crunching the others below my shoes. I like pretending I’m somewhere far away just before I reach my drive. And in those few seconds when I imagine “he” is at my door, my heart has never felt more alive.

Sometimes I like getting lost in my car on a street I'm supposed to know. When the signs and houses have changed, but I feel the same, in a good way. Other times I like when I'm so different, it seems appropriate to meet the street I walked on with bare feet as a kid.

I like the winter more than the spring, when the trees become dead looking and white things. I like the sleepy quiet, my disapearing white breaths. I like cold fingers and toes, because I know when I get home, there's a fire and cover and family there. And I like the cold stars that are really far and white and bright and quiet. I like plaid flannel shirts and coats and socks, especially the ones that reach my knees, and save them from the freeze of January, when snow flakes could fall.

I like the nights when I cuddle like a cat in the downy chair in my room, or my living tomb, where I’ve kept my life so near. My piano and guitar, my books and writing desk, my tin lid with holes from when I went shooting guns with ken, the Alabama hat that was my great uncle Jim's, my Bigdaddy’s carved birds, the locket and pictures and postcards and paintings, all of it I hold so dear.

I like the time after I close my eyes, not the minutes before. I like feeling the warm in my bed, the pillow under my head, and knowing everything else is shut out behind my door. I like thinking and dreaming before I am sleeping, and I’ll do it for as long as I can. And then I’m waking again, the light warm on the bed, and I try to lie still and hold on to it all while listening to the clicking of my fan. I try not to move, so I don’t ruin the visions I had of you, because somewhere between the night and the day, when I was quietly slipping away, you’re all my thoughts knew.

the in-between

Now is my favorite time, the in-between. It's not morning, because the sun isn't up, but it isn't really night, because it's morning.

Everything is sleepy and dreamy and quiet. The music is always especially good, and so is the lamp light and my fat chair. The folded down pages of my favorite books mean more, and so do the lyrics to the songs I set on replay.

I'm alone, but in the best way. My roommate and her dog sleep. The houses, and the people in the houses, and the cars sleep. I'm not really alone though, because I know that many of you love the in-between too. And you're reading, and listening to your songs, and sitting in your own lamp light, and being "alone" in the sleepy, dreamy quiet too.

"And in that moment, I swear we were infinite"

I could stay up all night, every night just to sit in the in-between, at least until the sky starts to turn gray. I could listen to all of the songs on my hardwood floors and rainy days play list, or maybe my ladies and guitars play list, and I could reread my favorite books, or write a book, or look at old pictures I keep under my bed. I tucked my feet beneath me, and read a psalms. I wrote some scratchy lines that no one will ever be able decipher on some paper, and considered it a prayer. I imagined the great things in my life to happen, and considered how I'd get to Switzerland one day, and felt peace considering it. Peace, if I didn't mention it, that comes with the sleepy, quiet in-between too, and it's the best part. It's not always there, because some in-betweens can be hard, but you're more likely to find peace in the in-between then you are in the bustle and the lights of the afternoon or the alarm clock screaming morning. At least, that's true for me.

Tonight, my favorite song is "silhouettes" by the careful ones, or maybe "slow dance on broken glass."

Something will happen. Because something always happens in the in-between. It's like the rules of life and science and whatever else are allowed to break. All of the potential is in the air for something to change, or to spark, or to rotate, I don't know how to say it better, there's just a delicate something in the air in the in-between, and if you stay up long enough, you'll get to feel it, or maybe breathe it in. I guess you can think of it kind of like a waking dream, I'm not sure I know what that means, but it sounds pretty right.

I guess it doesn't sound like much, but in the morning, I feel so sure that everything happened in the in-between. The clock ticked so slowly that I felt time move, and I got to live in it. I spent it hoping and living, and waiting for the great things to happen, like they so often do. The houses, and the people in their houses, and the cars were all sleeping, and I spent it trying to be apart of the something bigger, and if you live in the in-between like I do, you know what I mean.

I thought and became and loved. And those "things" really matter.