Sifting...

May 23, 2011

Driving through town today, I glimpse a tan car with a bike rack on the back and a tall, slightly bewildered guy with long hair loading fuel beside it.

For a moment, I am paralyzed, shock and fear creeping over my skin like a shadow. For a moment, I am lost on a vast wave of an unnamed emotion...unable to tell direction, unable to recognize myself.

Flashing back to reality, I realize his hair is blond and wavy.
Different guy.

And hesitantly, not trusting my own eyes, I breathe again.

Then a feeling of sorrow surfaces, the memory of a strong love inside me. I gave everything I had and this is where it led. Emptiness.

I feel a twinge in my heart of longing for acceptance. Then, somehow my thoughts shift further back in time, to a memory of another love, far deeper than that one, which somehow lives on, inside me.

This love is more innocent, with the purity of untouched youth and the integrity of inexperience.

I pull up to the post office to retrieve my mail for the first time since coming back home. The first person I see before me is my one remaining link to the actual person, (now mythic in my mind), who was the reciprocal of all that early love.

"I think he's supposed to get back today", she says casually, as we say a quick hello and then goodbye.

(He is real?)
He is real.

Instead of terror, this news gives me comfort. He belongs here. Just as I belong here.
I am glad he continues to love and return to this place.

And again, all these years later, I am swept away by the remembrance of that love that was grounded in the earth-but was so full of fire that it consumed us-till we finally tried to put it out.

Yet it undeniably lives on inside of me, like a constant flame that I warm myself by from time to time.

I don't know the person any more,
but I still love the spirit, no question.

And I can feel its mutuality. I, in turn, can feel that I am still loved.

It has that quality of forgiveness
regardless of circumstance.

And puzzling as it is, with odd pulls to the heart at unexpected moments, it's both unsettling and comforting to realize that it's still there, unchanged by time.

Next, I go to the market and buy a newspaper with my picture in it.
I stare at the picture, wondering how it might look through his eyes, after all this time between us...

Who is that girl?

In the black and white photo, I am in the background. There is a shadow over my face, yet somehow my teeth still look crooked. My body looks slim and my arms look strong, but my face...somehow it seems odd and ugly.
I guess that's how I still feel about myself.

Staring at the darkly shaded picture of my face, my life seems strange and obscure. I look like a grown-up. Who have I become?

I look so inconsequential, so average, so nonthreatening.
Has anything about me changed?