yobech505

Heart Dreamer

     It’s been decades, and a memory fades. It sort of drops off and finds a small corner to hide in, an ember of the bonfire it once was. Somewhere, maybe on the bottom of a log, or underneath the rocks that separate the fire from its surroundings, a small piece of charcoal wood lies, still wafting a tiny stream of smoke.

            In this time around, it may never be the raging tower of flames that it once was.Safely,  It shouldn’t be expected that it will be that way again. Not unless there are circumstances that no one has foreseen or predicted. Wisdom, of course, says don’t rule it out. After all is said, the heart still likes to dream.

            Glowing almost microscopically, it could be encased, but not snuffed in that hidden place that the heart designates for storage. That chip of warm soot covered flame residue is always there. And what of it? What tiny part of that inferno of fifty years ago carries with it is the significant part? The lingerer, a morsel of memory, cannot be doused.

            A long time back I had the uncompared experience of loving someone who would never be more than a woman I was in love with. Never my wife, rarely my girlfriend, never more that the maximum fates would allow her to be in my life and in the dreams that the corazon allows. Yet she filled all those roles, not in the centralized meaning, but in the abstract one. In and out of my life with the timing of an absent minded comedienne from Kamchatka, we were never in the place where crossed lives allowed the participants to stop in the intersection without fear of being squished by a semi. We met, we loved and we chuckled at the circumstances, often trying to throw them towards the wind to see what would happen. But it couldn’t. So, it didn’t. And neither did we.

            I can’t speak for the spirit. It is way beyond who and what she and I are at this moment or were in the moments before. Thus, the things written down in the here and now are a reflection of the there and then.

            Love has shared itself with me a few times; oft intensely, other times with short bursts of partial intensity, and still others that were slow to build and flow, smooth and growing. All the experiences are still there, somewhere in a storage locker with an access file that can pull them up when a smile is needed. Some ended on notes of sadness, others mutually, and still others, not at all. They are ranked as they sit, not in order of their importance, or influence on the inside me, but on the impact and how that became a part of who this writer is.

            The interesting aspect of the sparks that reignite the memory is not that a small flame will become a campfire. The fire itself will evolve into a warming moment, one that makes a ’once upon a time’ into a smile. It turns regret into ashes that blow away with the slightest breeze, but leaves the memory, as real as the days it became just that, as real as the experiences that made her who and what she was, and in ways that may not be easily explained, still is.

            So here is the heart dreamer. Inside, somewhere, is the faded memory. Where the fire once lit the surroundings, only an ember remains. The darkness, however, is warm. It doesn’t allow the sense of being afraid. It doesn’t take away the shadows, just puts them aside for a while. Because somewhere, in that warmth that can’t be extinguished, is another heart dreamer. And when the two dream at the same time, something stirs the coals, and sparks find fuel to relight flame. The two expand, touch each other to become a single unit, then; distance, obligation, unsolicited distraction, all step in to push them apart. They recede, go back into storage.

There they remain, unable to be put out, just contained.   Ready. Waiting.   Expecting. If only the heart dreamers knew the when.       

 1964-2014 and the meanings inferred…pas finis