WRITING: Emotion

Just as it may be the first piercing chirps in the morning of an ebbing winter, or the car radio playing, “I’ve got a brand new pair of rollerskates, you’ve got a brand new key…” that brings back the afterglow on a Saturday morning years long past when your roommate called and sang so badly into the phone, happy that she’d tracked you down because you weren’t home yet from last night; it’s the little things that can so easily bring you to the edge of tears as well as pleasure.

Aunt Neddie died; okay, I’ll be there at six. The car heaves smoke up to mingle with the leaves of the large oak it hugs as if in exhausting copulation; okay, I’m okay, the car’s totaled and I’ve gotten a ride home from that nice biker who looks like Tom Selleck and assures me I don’t really have to hang on that tightly, but I do anyway.

The action stalled and delayed, the ongoing trauma of diagnosis without results, the threat of rain instead of simply pouring down in decision; these are the breakers of human spirit. They live and talk and waltz around together in the mind, singing snatches of melody that can’t be grasped nor halted into peaceful silence with a flick of a knob. It’s the notes of the birdsong of crows and buzzards over a slowing life stretched out somewhere on the hot soft gold sand that touches the horizon in a fat black line in every direction. Cooling late afternoon and the weakening sun is just a silly sip to tease with the memory of how good water really tasted. As it gets cold and black and lonesome, sleep offers a rebuilding; in balms for the body and soothing salve for the soul. The mind is dulled, if lucky; or dreams free to paint its problems in neon colors of outrageous orange and magenta moods.

Meanwhile, the spiteful ants worry the carcass for days into weeks, and the honest lion never comes.

And always, there is another dawn.