I want to be blameless. I want to be left, not to leave. I want the city to lift itself from the earth and float out to sea. I will swim there if I want to find you, but for now leave me in the dirt and the trees. Leave me sitting half in the waves and entirely in the sunset. If I decided to let go, decided to go, what would that look like? That time I skipped my dentist appointment, does it look like that? Is it a new job or no job or an airstream in the desert. I don’t think I’m ready. Give me my veil back. Not to hide behind, but to carry around my neck, to float out the window along side the cacti of southern California.
This morning I woke up from a dream of a tsunami, then a flood of the undead. A house with too many windows on the first floor. A dream where I lost my keys too, and then my car was stolen. People filled a parking lot wearing my clothes and wrapped in my blankets, in my sleeping bag. The dream was too long and too real. I woke up wondering how I could secure the house, if there was a store of boards, of plywood, or if there were enough mattresses to hold the nightmare back. Scared for ten minutes and then some and I haven’t felt a dream like that in years.
Was it even Jesus who walked like that, or a woman dragging her child to safety? Not out of fear of past, or blind hope of future. Driven by a deeper importance of knowing what was behind and ahead. She wears a dress and holds a lantern high, stepping lightly across the sea.
Its not the written account, the history of homelessness that tells us the importance of a door and a kitchen, or a roof and the rare, wrap-around porch. It is a photograph, a tightening in a belly, a noise in the woods that points us home. Do we listen? Maybe, sometimes, when we can, when we want to, when we are slow enough and tired enough and lacking enough to hear the things we need rather than the things we want.
If the stars form us, not in the physical sense that only a mother can produce, but in our connectivity to the universe, to each other, to the minutia of ticks and traits, then why do they step out of their guiding role? Why stand disinterested? Are they feigning ambivalence from afar or do they mean it more than god?
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