It’s a dreary Monday afternoon. It’s grey. It’s damp. Instead of releasing the promise of rain, the clouds loom low in the sky. I’m coughing, throat raw and having a hard time breathing on top of that. My appetite is noticably suppressed, the mere thought of swallowing makes me wince. There is a 10 pound rock sitting on my chest, making me work for every gasp of air.
Amazingly, given all of this, I feel wonderful. I had a lovely weekend, and didn’t realize until I sat down to reread the last few posts that I completely neglected to mention it… I had a long bit typed out, detailing what I did with my weekend. Reading it over again, I realized that it only gave the mechanics of the weekend, it didn’t convey the essence, the magic.
When you were a child, did you ever have one of those days, the days filled with magic? Where you were convinced the afternoon would last forever, where the sky was a perfect cornflower blue and the grass green and sweet? Where there were toads behind every bush, the ice cream man came on time and you had just the right money for your favourite treat, which he actually had in the right flavour? Where the gloaming extended for several hours, instead of just a few minutes, and as you stopped and stood on the pedals of your bicycle you knew, you were convinced that if you exhaled you would scatter the magic to the four corners of the earth and it would all end?
That has been my life, these last eleven days. Only yesterday, standing on pedals looking out at the magic in front of me, I realized I couldn’t hold my breath any longer, I had to exhale and then, then the magic would scatter to the four corners of the earth only to stay with me as a memory. But I couldn’t breathe and had to let go, had to exhale.
And when I was done blowing, when I inhaled and opened my eyes, the magic was still there.
Thank you for listening, for letting me face my fears and paint them into objects I can see and conquer. Thank you for, in the face of your own weariness and frustration, letting me cry and trying to understand what I was feeling. Thank you for talking to me, thank you for asking me to stay another night, and thank you for what you said on the corner of 2nd and Pike. I will gladly miss another thousand lights to hear those words from you again.
I love you.