I went for a walk with my dog tonight

On this road nearby our house.

The sun began to melt, like warm butter over leaves and long blades of beach grass.

We passed big bellied couples in running shoes and shorts, their tight white t shirts pulled taught over wide guts that marched in unison down the path, like identical hard boiled eggs attached to spindly legs.

Some of them nodded at me as they passed. Some of them said “hello” and when they did I realized this felt strange to me, New York still having four years on this place's one.

A thinner, older pair came up on our left at a good clip. Where should we take our vacation? she asked him as they passed. I watched from their wake as he absentmindedly took her hand without looking up, his focus remaining fully on the road ahead.

The sun slipped closer to the water, all runny yolked, all sudden in its going, and I voiced a silent hope that it be so beautiful in California. Every night I dream it will be.

Young parents corralled the exuberance of their toddlers towards the sand. Plastic buckets clacked and flip flops slapped as they hurried to keep up with little bodies, little legs.

And I watched all this.

And I thought, this is heaven.

And then, how strange of me to think so, considering the summer it’s been.

But I do, think so. If only for this moment. This twilit gift. This sunset sky spilling over and on top of me and kissing, a million times, my sea shell shaped soul.

I pass days inside this numbed cocoon.

An orb of muted feeling. Of life in low gear.

I wonder what it feels like otherwise and this, more than anything, frightens me.

Because if the memory of real life goes, how can I move on? I need it to. Need it to fit like a plywood plank beneath a mud rutted tire. Need it to coax my lurching body up and away. To ease the transition from stuck to mobile.

But it’s a thick muck, this. All mired in her eyebrows, furrowed and afraid. In the toothpick forearms she pushes towards my hands.

She was once all bustle, all life. That feels like such a long time gone now, two months in.

But I hold her toothpick arm. Smile a brave mother’s smile, artificial to this childish face. Draw tight the sheets around her shoulders. The folds of my own muted cocoon, obscuring this terrible question.

This fear that where I’ve got her shell, that bustling spirit won’t return.

I spent six hours yesterday sorting through stuff that wasn’t mine.

Learning about old photographs, lockets and locks of hair, all linked to the history of someone else.

And I walked away wondering how much I really mattered.

Because I myself known nothing of my BLOOD. Of the others who share it.

Still, sometimes…and these days in particular…I think I may known more than most about what makes a family. And where to find the one you’ve been given.

And in these moments, I don’t think twice about whether or not the same STUFF passes through our veins.

…It’s just stuff anyways….

“Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square. Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer’s day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men’s stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o’clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.”

—

Scout Finch, To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee Sometimes the very best comfort comes from our old friends. And likewise, old friends come in different shapes, sizes and forms. In this case, the old friend I’ve turned to is embodied by the immortal words of Ms. Harper Lee in her, To Kill a Mockingbird. It’s a novel I read for the first time in grade school after which I was never the same. Her words have shaped my own and continue to do so each time I trace their shape across the page, finding within their familiar lines, new lessons and old loves.

The novelist imagines…

Youth

Beauty

Brilliance

Brains

And pushes for their contradictions.

What it’s like outside ones own skin.

What goes on inside that woman’s head.

I’ll admit, oftentimes I look around and think, very quietly and to myself alone, that other people seem oh so unconscious.

Occupied so immediately with the PRESENT PROBLEM…which is always immediate, albeit limited to hunger and rage. It’s this every shifting entitlement of our age that has, I sometimes think, caked over and buried any capacity for collective, connective thought.

Such has been unlearned over the years and people now waddle about in a state of frantic want.

And isn’t that sad?

For all of us. Even for me, poor writer, who sits back with her pen and thinks herself superior. Acknowledges the thought and feels sorry for it. Pushes on, examines it deeper and admits that it’s all fluff. All rubbish anyways.

Because her job is to imagine life inside another person’s shoes. And deep down, she fears herself too anxious to lace up and live in discomfort, anxiety and fear.

To stay there without the protective walls she’s built up, for longer than the length of a poem.

These split fragments of feeling. These seconds of insertion into distant hearts. Into the ambiguity of the Other. The road to creativity that moves in circles and ends at its beginning.

Ends with the realization that all hearts are familiar.