I’m not satisfied. I am, but then I’m not. Will the next thing be better? Let me abandon this for that, build my castle in the sky while leaving the safety and comfort of my bungalow in the forest. What a dilemma. I feel like burying my head in my hands, feeling the disappointment, the lamenting of thousands of hills of failures, with tattered clothes in the wind on their gravestones.
What’s so wrong with running headlong into the unknown, its darkness ripping our wings into shreds as we sputter off edges? To fly or to fall; we shall see.
At the ironrod gate, I stand in the cold. For you to see me waver, to sit, to turn, to wipe my brow, I will not. I do it not for you but to prove, to myself, I am not broken. I stand rebuilding what no one ever took. What I never gave.
Like a pedal of a piano my heart thumps in time. I am yours for the taking. To risk, to love, to be made a fool.
And so I return to my float in the canopy of sparse evergreens, to their gaps where the cottonwoods wave, their leaves flippering like gold specks against a sea-blue sky. To the place where my heart opens, like a book to its best part, and it’s here that I teeter, on one side an Olympic-sized pool of gushing pains and monsters to the other side of safety. It’s being caught and like a caterpillar into a butterfly, I transform. Hell to heaven.
The final note before the curtain falls. Then seconds of silence before the audience takes to their feet, bones in knees crack, hands to mouth whistles, well-stringed roses wrapped fragile paper are thrown.
Going On 40 