yobech505

Many of us like to swallow the concept of a soul mate, someone who we will hang out with through one life after another, or in many different lives, at different times, until we have the consummate person, or individual as a permanent connecticator.  A soul mate; souls meant to be together all the time, life, after life, after life.  Thank something that they are not always the same shell on the outside.  But my dilemma is more the role our soul mate will take.  

It is usually assumed, at least by the conversations I’ve had with others who believe, the soul moves on after death to another shell known as a human being.  Reincarnation, some testify as to its definition.  In a way, it kind of makes sense, at least for those who believe it occurs, and explains the things one knows about another that they never would have known even with access to in the other’s brain processors.  Historical stuff shows up as well.  You could only know if you’ve been there, but it was in another, previous, lifetime.  

In the Sutphenesque interpretation, it is always a partner.  And this is where I run into clumps of logs and mud hiding who our soul mate is, was, or should be.  It limits it way too much.  Why do we have to have a lover as a soul mate?  Is it more the emotional connection or does it have to be physical connectivity as well?  What are the rules set down in unwritten writings?  Is it gender specific?  In all that I have read, it’s two people of dissimilar X and Y.  Why?  Is another link not allowed in the eternal time thing?  Sidenote; Does the soul actually have a gender?  That seems to be so limiting.  

Dump the lover category.  I have one very filling relationship in my life.  It is the only interconnection I have ever had that has a constant and in depth impact.  I sense my soul mate.  I know and sense the intensity of love, a lot deeper than a surface of love and connection.  It’s a she.  But it wouldn’t matter if it wasn’t.  In continuation, it is not physical at all.  There is no sensual attraction.  There is no desire to go further than an intense sense of loving her and having her love me back.  And there never will be; because it’s not supposed to be and doesn’t need to be. It’s not a definition required to fit the category. Obviously, I believe that a soul mate can be more than the given stereotype.

Think about the person who’s very nearness calms you down.  When you’re in their thoughts, you know. Think about the one who, even when they curse, scream and yell, within levels of time, still loves you unconditionally and your feeling are mutually akin to theirs.  Think about the person who you would do more for than anyone else, not based on have to or to please, but on a desire to, and who’s hurt causes the most intense heartbreak when you can’t fix their pain.  And within that realm, you know the soul inside is so much a part of your soul that you never want to give it up.  It’s not dependent, possessive, jealous, hateful or longing.  It doesn’t give direction to a way of life, or inhibit open desire or another part time link.  It’s just a soulful connection that you hope never goes away.  Even in short terms of time, it’s an unwavering link that causes the heart to exert its longing, just for the presence of nearness.  Other conditions are irrelevant.  

In my next life, I want to tap together, like mobil phones  sharing passwords, and make sure that her life, no matter the temporary direction she chooses to take, links us in the special way I sense we are and will be connected, forever. I never want to lose the connection to her soul.  I never want to not know her presence and her love.  

Losing a good memory is a bane, and often something we just don’t seem to be able to control. Time, change, growing in undetermined patterns takes care of that. Getting the handle on a ‘whoever’ who had some impact on who we were, are and become is one of those things that can be elusive to a point but not willingly forgotten.  I don’t want that.  It’s a keep memory that doesn’t have enough space on my personal memory chip.  The inquiry is, how do I bring it back?

It requires ignition.  Something has to be there, implanted in someplace we haven’t looked or even thought to investigate. It needs to show up somewhere.  And this one did.  I don’t remember where, but perhaps she can remind me how she came back from merely an unclickable icon  that I wished was more, into something that rather resembled a full screen shot.

We never dated.  Not sure it crossed either wavelength, although my interpretation of what her mind was engaging is only conjecture. (We did hang out at the senior picnic).  It’s just the vision, as clear as the moment of her first reflection in my retinas, one of something unmatched, more unique than anything I am unable to compare it to. There was that ARAMCO connection our fathers and uncles shared, but I’m not sure we knew it then.

I don’t know if she carried the awareness,  but she had the most unassuming elegance of anyone I’ve ever known. I saw it immediately. No arrogance, no ego, no untouchable sophistication, just a natural elegance.  Her stride, the motion of her arms as they gently moved with her walk, the simplicity of how she put me at ease and a voice as gentle as spring’s first warming breeze, I was stricken.  I didn’t know what this was.  I didn’t recognize it as love, and it wasn’t infatuation, and who she was, I would guess,  wouldn’t allow that anyway.  Was it mysterious?  That, I can’t identify, but it didn’t feel that way. I don’t know the feeling. I still don’t pretend to easily recognize it.  I’ve never seen or felt it elsewhere, at least not in the memory banks of this one of my lifetimes. Oh.  And with it, she carried around a very obvious and unassuming intelligence.

Somehow or other, as much as I would like to say ‘we refound each other’, I suspect that is not the case. ‘Refinding’ might assume a more complicated relationship.  Not necessarily the direction I am meaning to imply. Not pining, not longing for the love I missed. More like; the modern information age allowed me to call up the encounters of a gentle memory.  A reunion of twelfth grade mis memories brought her back. I like to believe I initiated the encounter and all the recollections that rediscovery entertained. (Yeah, right!) There she was, like the rest of us, older, now full of life’s experiences, but just as completely and subtly elegant as the first time I saw her. 

Time tugs the ropes we’ve tied to so many parts of life.  We are directed in directions, living with our experience and the events that have towed us to where we are at this spot in the time continuum. Memories pop up, some with the impact of a toy bubble bottle, others with the subtlety of an over loaded pot of science experiments. Which is this? A question not easily responded to. We now meet with no more than a cup of coffee and a large table of conversation, filling in years of the things that happened, and surprisingly, actually caring. The elegance persists.  But the question of what it was, and still is, that makes my mind put her in the feelings category memory files she slides into, is still the question I can’t answer.  So, as indicated,  it’s on to the next cup of coffee somewhere down the avenue.   I wish I knew what it was?  Or do I?   If it is currently an unknown, then finding out might be groovy.

Unmarried now for eleven years.  Dabbing at relationships here and there but never in hot pursuit.  I only blab for myself and I am a light weight pursuer determined to make my intentions clear from the start.  I ponder.

Raised two sons on my own for those years.  Enjoyed it, became it, and lived it.  A single dad, living a single life that I was betrothed towards, and that was seeing that my sons made it through the tangle of the teen, middle and high school years. It allowed the visitors who happened to step into my path to hang out, but that is as extensive as it got.  And when they said too much, I skipped through the haunted forest to my own secret hideaway in the woods, just behind my emotions. 

I’m just not worth it, or so I tell myself.  Not the material of ‘let’s hang out all night in our jammys, ‘(or start that way) and…er, no.  I explained it.  I went over it in the details of the pre spend the night conversations.  She followed with her tag, ‘I feel the same way’. Durnitall.  That didn’t last long.   Them; they feel I am worth it?  Now, where did they get that idea?

I question my own relationship stability.  My boat rocks so far to each side in threatening to capsize, and the sea sick patrons who look at me and should say what I think they are thinking, don’t.  Did I error in what I supposed was their thought processes?  I must have.  I am the only one who questions it?  Serious enough?  I appear to be the only one who questions me, my ability to sustain a duoship, and how long it will allow a dual collaboration.  I love friends, amigos, hang out with me folks.  I have no idea where to go with a lover.  I don’t seem to be able to decide if that is a compass point I even want to direct my emotions towards.  Do they see me as worth it?  Do they need psychiatric help?  Our visions of who I am and who they think, or hope, I am are going in different directions, with me on the starboard tack so I have the right of way.  Collisions happen despite an attempt to follow the rules.

Who can tell people how to feel?  How many people do I know who have control of their emotional crashes? There ain’t many, I am pretty secure in determining.  But why me? I don’t see it, even within my own emotional and tractable construction site.  Yet they do.   

At this subway station in my life’s adventure, I am exiting the train.  When it stops on the return route, I have no inkling of whether or not I will get on.  I just don’t know.  If she knows when she’ll board, I won’t even attempt to keep her from letting the doors close behind her and finding a seat.  If I am on board, I will give her mine, unless they’re all taken and we are standing in the center aisle.  At least for the present voyage.  Next trip, who the hell knows?

I don’t want to leave an impact that is so big it can’t be detoured around. It leaves too emotional a crater that takes too damn long to fill.  I don’t like burdening others, emotionally or physically.  The punched factor is too much. Hence, I develop my own version of polar opposition.  The problem with that is that it only protects me.  Selfish, perhaps?  See the first phrase of the third paragraph.  

Advisory: Wear your hard hat and have a back up plan.  I am not a runner, but when I am walking along side of the other person, and the situation appears more scary than what I feel it should be, the distance between us will probably increase.  It’s me.  It has nothing to do with ‘personal’.  

Durnitall   n, v, p   Darn it all     Duoship n  twosome relationship

In she walks.  Cool.  What is that?  Her laundry?  Egads and gadzooks!  That pile is huge!  Then, she sets it down next to mine.  Meter stick out.  Who’s is bigger.  Easy to measure.  And damn, mine is three quarters of an inch taller than hers.  Who gets to use the machine first?  Off to the basement or down the street to the laundromat.  It has to get done.  Cleaned?  Folded and put away.   

After it is washed, dried and folded, is it still our dirty laundry?   Does it still set a parameter for who we are, what we’ve become from the years of washing, wearing, folding and putting away?  How much of it have we thrown away, to no longer use?  None?  Some?  Only when it is so worn out that it doesn’t serve the purpose we purchased it for?  

Like that’s going to make a difference! How many of us, in our personal lives, can throw it all away and go scan our phone over the sensor at our local megastore for a whole new set of  garments that we will wear once or twice before they become dirty laundry?  How many of those carriers of laundry baskets can actually pay the price to dispose of the old and purchase the new with the intent to never be where we were before?  We don’t buy a different size than the ones that are worn out.  Often, we don’t even buy a different brand.  

Yes, I know, the body shifts distribution as we grow older, but the two afore mentioned situations are usually close together so we don’t get the big changes that online retailers try to convince us we need to do.  We purchase to replace what we wore out, not what we outgrew.  Herein, we have to consider; do we insist on the same eventual laundry pile we first stacked, or do we say, ‘I’m going to get rid of my dirty laundry and replace it with something easy to clean and keep, until I need to change it again for fear it will become very dirty laundry that, for some reason, seems harder to dispose of.

Is this a need for courage?  What is that, when it comes to dirty laundry?  The metaphor of a change of clothes taken from the dirty pile versus the clean one may not have the effect we need.  Move on to the new bags from the store that are sitting on the kitchen table where they were left right after an entrance.  Wear them.  Or do you wash them first, even if they come in a sealed package?  And, if so,  do you put them with the dirty laundry to be sanitized by an over advertised detergent, or are they separate?

It is determined by some, I surmise, that throwing away the once worn laundry as dirty, and purchasing new, even if washed prior to clothing oneself, every time, would be the equivalent of not having dirty laundry, at least for recycled wearing purposes.  The new would not be dirty, even if you did wash them prior to wearing them.  But once you take them off, they’re dirty laundry, even if you throw them away, instantly.  So how do you get away from dirty laundry?

Maybe you don’t.  Really, why should you?  It’s part of who you are and we all have it, even if we don’t necessarily change our clothes that often.  I suppose it is, at times, more imperative that we clean it up and fold it, put it in a drawer and pay no attention to what it may say about who we were, as if we used a strong bleach to change its color or threw in a cheap red t-shirt to unintentionally dye it.  Maybe we should just take out one at a time, close the drawer and notice the minor impact a garment, clean or dirty, actually has.  

Might maybe.  Who comprehends this stuff in today’s portion of the current era.  It isn’t me, I don’t think.   But damned if I don’t try.   Events come along, leave an imprint then either stay or move over to the next section of life’s stage.  

She’s really nice. And quite alike, or so the early impressions indicate, me.    

It’s been years, which she will understand, and events and other people, which she will also have an handle on, but now, the timing seems to be synchronized.   Still, what is the significance of that?  Is it a direction to be pursued, a hint to be followed or just some scoped event that is more passer by than ‘lets have another glass of wine and look at the next step’.  I don’t plan these things, and neither does she.  So, the inquiry is left wide open.

Go ahead.  Ask me what I would like to be the next direction of a possible voyage to a relationship more in depth than I’ve embraced in a while. If she’s ‘the one’ and I go towards another point on the compass, what will the impact on psyche and ego be? Questions, inquiries and askings are not, perhaps,  the route to the answer, but this is full of them.  

 I’m just stating what’s hiding out front in my wishful desire brain.  

I did begin with something I called, but somebody else invented, logistics.  She’s there.  I’m there, here and over somewhere else, in seeking mode, trying to determine how to work this dilemma, which it shouldn’t become, out.   Seriously, folks, what if, for this level of my existence, she is the ‘one’? That success would depend on, am I that same role player in her life?  After that realization, I conclude that I am not a mind reader.  No, I already knew that.  

These things work, or, to be more in line with reality, these things can work.  I’ve never done it, but the stories others relate, true or made up, say they do, and don’t.  There it sparks again!  Another meteor burning up in the atmosphere, or, did it make it to solid ground, leaving a long lasting pock mark?  

I’ll wait.   I’m known as much for being impatient as for being patient.  Wait a second.  That doesn’t help!  An adventure is just past the next row of rolling hills and may open up to workable and fun or close down to, naw, this ain’t working, and little or no emotional hardships but a thought of ‘what if?’   No self inflicted pressure allowed here.  It has to take a route that may include experimentation, giving some of the silly stuff up, and allowing the other to be who they are without consequence, ridicule or judgment.  After all things are determined, isn’t that how a possible relationship should work, if the participants really do find a joyful way of continuing.  

The one?  Let’s leave it up to a form of emotional logistics

Pondering Problems

Thinking.  Pondering is what that means, according to some of the definitions found in minds and words of a few of the things that I’ve perused in writings by others.  So I’m using it, I suppose.   Well, yes, I am doing just that.   Thinking.  About what?  Rambling on with no actuarial direction, making sure the books are balanced?  Or none of the above.  Then, I arrest my movement.  Yes to the above.  

What do I do with relationships, in my singularity of singleness?  Do I have even the tiniest ambitious desire to become two with anyone after being just an individualistic entity for the extended period of time that I have identified with that situation?  I would surmise; probably not.   And why would that be the case?  For the lack of want, or need?  Maybe just the act of being in one causes me to say , ‘What the hell do I want to do that for?”  Especially considering (or pondering, as the terminology dictates) where I have been in the twosome field in my  distant past.   Tend to not lend too much weight into it.  Haven’t done well, as histories of mine have attested to.

There are those who are interested, for sure.  And there is me, who is interested, not for sure.  And these can clash like a banana under the wheel of a semi.  Squish   I have this nice flat relationship where only the skin and some gooey stuff exfoliated from it are visible.  Not very appealing and at least, lacking any convincing authority.  Amicable, but not solidified.  Ewwww.

So what comes after the realizations we managed to allow to float to the top of our relationship mindset?  Do we go on or do we say, No way, Hose A.   Or we could imitate a real coupling, not as is actually happening but more like, this is what it looks like is happening, we go from there, but we end from where?

My record says I am not very good at it.  Not always, but sometimes, I put a terminal conclusion to the two, making it one, me, myself, and they, themself, and ‘ere the twain does meet, or unmeet from that point on.  I have sustained a few, until one of us got tired and began running elsewhere, dropping excuses to mark our trail out of the couple thing.  And there were times when I left the colored stones for her to find.

Let me think about it for a minute.   Pondering as I wait.  I don’t like breaking up.  So, to avoid that, I think (ponder) about it and say, why not just avoid it in the primary place?  If you don’t go there, you don’t have to come back any time.  You don’t have to leave or get left.  You just stay stagnant where you are, unmoved and unattended, emotionally and physically.   Painless.  Feelingless.  So, is it a good hiding spot, or just a temporary pancho pulled over my head until a wind carries it away?  I think I mean the pancho, not my head.

But as I ponder further, I like turning to someone and saying ‘isn’t that beautiful’ or ‘yes, I’ll have another cup of coffee.’  I like getting her a cup of coffee as much as having her bring me one.  And it’s one of the nice things when she orders me to look at the coyote running through the yard, her voice smiling with excitement.  

I have to know what I want.  But I don’t.  Or do I?  So after pondering about it, it becomes pretty self revealing.  The adventure is better than the results that may occur from it. I’ve taken chances before.  Some came with reward and some ended in disappointed characters sitting about feeling sorry for themselves (or myself).  By not making a promise to be someone I am not, making you someone you don’t want to be, or just letting things follow the current until it ends or fades into another one, let’s think, or ponder, ‘what should I do next?’

Opportunity Costs

Pre note: Sometimes I get to this stuff, other times, the stories sit inside the memory chambers and collect dust. Still, again, they may be created and stagnate on the desktop, waiting for a MAC to bring them to incentive level again so I can publish them. (The old MAC laptop, alas, has been demised-ified, if such a fate exists) So, for the readers who manage to be okay despite the long rest periods in between the short burst of my self proclaimed productivity, ‘it’s on its way’…

(back to) Opportunity Costs. Walking the Dogs

If you don’t take the opportunities that are offered as the growing process continues, the chances that much will come to enrich a life exists at just below zero. We writers, pro or amateur, are always in search of inspiration; things that will force out the creative, at least as our minds see it, then present it as our egos allow, often making more of it that the reader sees. Those of us who tend to believe we are better than we are, grab at these opportunities in hopes of finding the spark that ignites the road flare, bringing attention to our creative gestures.

As quickly as we can, the knocking has to be responded to, less we end up losing it in a jumble of afterthought and distraction.   So, there she was. Really. As opportunities go, there is, most likely, only an illusionary ‘nothing to see folks’ imprint in the brain that we rubberneck to see anyway. The ‘oh, here it is’ part. But there she was. We have so much in common!   We’re both walking our dogs! It’s a castle topper, what walking a dog can bring. Or maybe the layer of rebar and concrete that makes a foundation for later on when the castle plans actually gets approved by the county inspector and construction can begin.

Yep. There she was. Again. (Note; smile in voice) And as circumstance would present itself, the opportunity went ‘boing!’ and popped up in front of me. So I took it. After all, I can handle rejection so what the hey? Only, there wasn’t any.   Gasp, gasp. Now, what do I do? Smile and try to bring my heart’s mind to a level of reason seemed like the best alternative. Too early to talk about taking a cruise to the Caribbean together, n’est ce pas? But an opportunity arose, and I swung from the vine and hit the baseball square on the bat. Stand up double.

While waiting on the second base bag, I was made to wonder, how many times have I done just that? Nothing? And how many times have I reached for that which was passing close enough to at least reach over and ask? As often as the word ‘no’ was said in one form or another, a ‘yes’ would suffice with a higher frequency. That quick and short feeling was always good, and it didn’t really matter where it all ended up.

On the edge of the seat, the reader sits. “What happened?” They don’t want to set the book down on the nightstand because the story ending will be theirs and not the one the author intended. All part of my evil plot? No. Speaking as if trying to interpret what the writer is saying, the only reason there is nothing here is, clearly, for now, there can be no more than that. But in the mood of the passing opportunity, and for now, until then, the nothing part is really okay.

Aloha

Distances

Lost moments, more than a short stint behind the wheel of the favorite auto mobile, are not easy to replace. Still, if they never happened then it shouldn’t really matter. It doesn’t, of course. They barely took place. But it can’t keep the imagination from pretending that it did to a degree far beyond the actual.

The difficult part;

Our imaginations play tricks, all the time. But if a desired one is there, somewhere, untouchable in the moment, it makes us yearn to bypass the prankster mentality and make what the dream creates an actuality.   So simplistic, yet it becomes the most awkward task of an obstacle thrown in front of us, making the whole psyche shake with frustration sitting along side fragile reality.

Not love, which looms in a hidden distance, as a few might expect, although that possibility peeks from the depth of the electrons sending impulses inside unknowing brain cells. Meanwhile, rewarding struggles cope with a measure of uncertainty because the data is incomplete and not enough neurons have the necessary background to make the print out understandable.

So it’s there.   But what can you do about it?

Love. Scares the bones out of so many who have tried it and soured the memory with not positive impulses. Love; jumping into an upbeat abyss of ignorance that doesn’t matter at the time. Love. Words that deny and defy meaning because nobody can really know what or where it is going. We don’t get a program or direction manual to go with it. The implant, the expiration date, they come and go as they please without prior warning and without any reasoning.

So it is something that is reveled in. The anticipation makes it all worthwhile. The wishing, without the well, the lamp or the four leaf clover, keeps it all going, hanging on to hopes that this time it is right. This time, it works. This time is the last time. No need for more, or less. Just the time, and the place, fitting together despite barrier and distance, anticipated with that dream thing that was mentioned earlier.

It may be near the first mission built along the El Camino Real. Or, perhaps the one time outpost that depended on peace with the Apache Cochise or maybe the first to ratify. It is still a distance that stretches beyond walls of miles which makes it a real but not unclimbable challenge. Nothing should be imbedded in a stone structure that stretches The Divide that is too great to overcome. This doesn’t mean, of course, that the interstate is too long, or too pocked with potholes that it can’t be transversed. It just means that the road stretches and can only be shortened by that which is difficult to acquire. If it is secured by the inside of us when the pieces and large particles that tend to clutter the path, are determinably pushed aside.

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  

Roads Passed – Missed Offramps.

 Vocabulary for this document;

misplan (mis’ plan) v. see misconfusion

misconfusion (mis con’ fuse on) adj. you done messed up.

            The oxygen converting being I often infer to as myself likes to ramble towards what was missed, not seen, on an overgrown dirt trail I move through as I encompass life. Her! That one who got past what I saw as there, the one the common people say ‘slipped away’, and I didn’t actually miss, I just had too much lotion collected between my digits and, what do you know?

            She goes way back. Before time changed who I wanted to be and made me what I should be. I was trothed, and not to her. So it wasn’t going to happen. At least not in an acceptable pre use of the word ‘format’. Oh the fret I would conjure in my cranium.   But the dent this female version of her left in my Corazon, it pushed the rest of the contents aside so it could make room for itself. And waited.

            She’s a brave one, for sure. And I am finding I admire that in all I meet who fit that rare category of courage. They’re out in terra, walking, doing jobs some may not be particularly happy with, maybe struggling to make emotional and physical and financial ends cover the necessities of human participation on the planet and the location they currently take residence within.

            They’re doing that pole vaulting thing with poles that are inches too short for their needs, yet they still clear the bar, albeit with often a rather expressive profanity that formative aged listeners should not have reflected off their ear drums.

            Admiration totally due!

            Hidden in all those stacks of rolled pages of hurt, struggle and turmoil is love. For me, for her, for both of us from both of us, how should I know?   At least I don’t really climb into it from her blood pump. But mine? That hidden little part that was stuck in some dusty opening between two bigger pieces, fell out when I saw the real her, the undyed hair that makes her honest and real, and the not even close to crafty, crafty smile that is as real as global warming and as precious as a stream of water from the highest point in the Sierras.  And?  The courage is, I must admit and in doing so use the not awkward terminology, a ‘turn on’.

            So, here is me. That very example of what shy isn’t, peeping from the cramped closet of my ADD, I forget, misplan, move about in harried misconfusion and generally do exactly what web searches tell me not to do.

            Damnit, missed again! How many short ops will be doled out to that wayward seagull who has the wrong wind direction but only has to sit on a rolling wave that pushes towards the Coast of the Great Pacific Northwest, and be patient that she will be there when the water wall spews plankton over sandy entries to pathways inland.

            Will she be sitting astride the waiting stool, looking, cracking groaner stories and purging from her marvelous lady brain, witty, yet thought of with some aplomb, remarks and critiques?

            28 rotations around the giant hydrogen fired light ball and now she shows up, the her I’m talking about?

Yep, while I toyotaed across the land that Vespucci claimed to have mapped, she waited and I missed Exit 2 on the I’ll See You Next Time turnpike. Not that it would have been more than deciding what looked best at the farmer’s market, consuming modified versions of it, then refilling the self propelled auto mobile with the refined remains of life in the Pleistocene era, but how will I ever sleep again without some knowledge of what ifs keeping me awake for at least five sixty second sweeps of the smallest hand on my watch.

            So, alas, all I do is ponder my next detour in case there is construction on Exit 3