#1

What happens happens in silence. In the darkness of the night tears fell. His tears.

A strong, solid man weeping. Alone. In a chair in the dark.

Exhausted.

So tired of trying to hold it all together all the time. At the office, with his family, in his circles. Some days are too hard.

From every direction people are critical. Even when they don't mean to be. It's the unspoken judgements. The tiny slights.

The weight on his heart from another failed love.

He can't quite figure out why all these relationships crumble out from under him.

For years now he's been okay with himself. The trials of life have served him well and made him who he is. He's learned to look in the mirror and like the man who looks back at him.

Except for these rare moments he even enjoys his times alone. It almost never comes to this, but maybe it's the season. Maybe it's just been too long. Maybe it's the silence.

He leans his head back and rests it against the back of the chair. His eyes close and he lets himself go. In this dark room he sits, eyes closed, tears running down his cheeks until there are no more.

A deep sigh fills the room.

He lifts his drink and swallows the cool relief in his glass. It's shallow and lasts just moments before his head is back and his eyes are closed again.

Alone in his mind with his loneliness.

A fantasy begins.

Tears are still escaping his eyes and rolling down his face as he dreams.

The door opens, his secret love walks in, comes across the room, kneels near the chair and takes his hand.

When the Past Comes Knocking

From inside the washer I heard the doorbell. I had been deep in my own thoughts and bent half inside the washer trying to get the last wet socks from the bottom when it rang. In a moment it registered, oh, doorbell.

Up the stairs I went wondering what it would be. UPS, neighbors, some door to door peddler wanting to sell me weak cleaning supplies or magazines that never arrive. I never imagined it would be my past standing there looking in the window.

I opened the door and he automatically began his pitch, trying to sell my something I didn't want. I simply stood there staring at him. Shocked and yet amused.

I had changed.

Over the years I had made a break from it all. Rather dramatically, I'd walked away from my life, just left, went to a new place and began again.

The pattern of my life repeated. It seems I had forever been leaving a place and leaving my identity with it. Moving in and starting over.

The difference was this time, I really thought I had changed. Changed for real. Become someone I wouldn't abandon with another move.

When time and life conspired to bring me back to one of those towns I'd left a life in before, I took the challenge and moved. The difference was this time, I packed up who I was, who I had become and took her with me.

When I got to the new place and unpacked, I unpacked her too. I put her on like a familiar sweat shirt and took my place in this new beginning.

Years went by and I always knew it was possible. After all, the cliche's in life ring true, it's a small world and I was bound to bump into someone from before at some point.

I just never imagined my past would literally come knocking at my door.

But there he stood.

Talking and rambling and selling, shifting foot to foot, smiling and charming, just like days gone by and for a moment, my heart leaped. I won't lie and say it didn't. It did. A little hop for old time sake. Standing there in the sun he cut a fine line and the sale as smooth as any I'd ever heard roll out his mouth.

But just as a summer cloud washes over the sun for a breath, my mind blinked and I became myself again, my new self and I spoke.

"Scotty?"

"Is that really you?"

"Um, yeah, my name is Scott. How did you know?"

"Are you still working at the Dragon Lair?"

"Uh, no...I haven't been there in years. Do I know you?"

"I worked with you there, Scotty, for years. You don't recognize me?"

"No. Are you sure?"

"Oh yeah. I'm sure. I was there when Frank was manager, then Jimmy and Chris and Adrienne and, you really don't know me do you?"

"Sorry, just not really familiar. So do you want to buy this or what?"

"No, no, sorry. It's my policy not to buy door to door."

Closing the door and walking away, I was stunned. Had the years been that hard? Was I that fat and gray that I was unrecognizable?

It dealt a tiny blow to my ego, realizing that all those years of nights in the bars with this group of people I claimed as my friends were really nothing. If I couldn't be recognized a mere 3 or 4 years after the days ended, I could not have really meant anything then.

Reality is like sunlight on the water. It glimmers and sparkles but it gets sucked under into the blackness of the deep and it's gone.

All those drinks. All those dollars. All those parties and hours and laughs and tears. Nothing.

Nothing memorable to anyone but me.

Broken Relationships

The singer croons..."I wanna leave a legacy, how will they remember me...".

A legacy.

As I near 40, realizing perhaps the first half of my life is almost at it's end, I wonder, how do they remember me, am I leaving a legacy?

I think the first half of my life is marred with failure and I doubt the second half will be better.

I look back and see all the broken relationships, I see my faults, my failings, disasters.

But there were two of us. Always. We were both broken by it. But we were both built by it too.

Those shattered pieces fell into place over the years making a mosaic that is simply who each one of us is.

In the dark of winter there is no mercy for the heart, blistered and drained.

I wonder if in the next 40 years I'll see those relationships wind their way back through. I wonder if repairs will be made or if simply a clean slate is there, washed by the sea of our lives gone by. I wonder if we'll again become fast friends. I wonder if we'll look into each others eyes and see sacred souls again.

I wonder if that is a thing born only of youth and new relationships.

Like puppy love.

Will I see through the cynic, the sarcasm, the pessimist and see tenderness, hope and fear?

Annoyed

So today I wrote you 20 mintues, yes a bonus, of brilliance and in a single key stroke it's gone.

And the words were so very hard to come by today.

It's why it's a challenge.

Set the clock. Begin again.

Something new this time.

******************************

One day it will happen, or so I imagine. We'll spend the day together. We'll reminisce. We'll reconnect. We'll remember why we were close years and years ago. We'll share laughs and warm sun, perhaps the ocean. Water always makes life better. Sand and a beach, barefoot and sunburnt. The food will have been wonderful. Filling and tasty and light all at once. Fresh.

Everything about the day, warm and smiling.

By evening, we'll share another meal. A dinner. More serious. Darker, simply because darkness is falling upon us. It will still be warm. There will be rich wine. A fire. Our conversations will wind around back on us.

We will be both young again and old all at once. Our lives stretching into each others. Trying to connect where the gaps tore it open. We each have questions only the other can answer.

They will be honest and tender because we were then.

Not because we are now.

Our lives now are pieces dealt out all around us. We try hard to play them in a winning hand. Sometimes we do. Often it is all a bluff. No chips on the table.

But only in this moment does it seem this way. When the lights snap on and we say our good byes, when we walk back into our lives, we know we are holding winning hands. We know our lives turned out exactly the way they were meant to be. We know we are living the lives we were called to live.

For a moment though, before the quiet flame of the fire, we are kids again, chasing the fantasy of what life could be, of what life will be.

We are gentle with the truth, sensing how it made us who we are. We are gentle with today's truth, the reasons we're still seeking to have each other play a part in the today, and yet with answers now spoken, we know it's over. The long conversation ended.

A dream half dreamt that won't come true for that very reason. If the conversation is had, the questions spoken aloud, answers given in hushed voices, then there is no reason to continue on. And there is a part of us that enjoys those relationship mysteries. Shared history without all the pieces. A little fuzziness on both sides leaves everyone with warmth and the power to over look and slights of decades past.

What was lost was better. A shame it always goes that way.

Total silence and brilliant sun wraps around this room.

Exquisite.

So what does she do, but closes her eyes, because the story lies on the other side.

All through the night the tale told itself and made her toss and turn. Over and over around and around, single scenes disjointed from each other walking before her eyes.

Snipits of conversations, glimpses of people...

"Hey, how are you?"

"Wonderful. I'm great. We're excellent." She says, smiling, knowing the truth is betrayed in her eyes, completely counting on the fact that S. never looks her in the eyes. Their conversations are ones that consist completely of small talk. Over a year's worth of small talk.

Nothing real. Just chat.

And exactly as always, S. turns repeats a similiar set of chats with another 20 people in the next 20 minutes.

Wasted words.

Finally, there is a moment. The chaos is subsiding for a while, the sounds are still blasting away at my brain, but all my responsibilities are spoken for. I have a tiny amount of time all to myself as long as I don't leave the area.

I sit. And wait. Wait for my shoulders to let go. Wait to realize I haven't taken a deep breath all day. Wait to just be.

I grab my book out of my bag and open it up. I read a few words and look around. My back begins to release and I'm starting to breath. I hold up the book again and let the words swim.

I'd love to be in a place where I could simply shut my eyes and day dream.

Then I see S. out of the corner of my eye. She's looking through the observation window. She sees me. Eye contact. I smile, nod. She smiles back.

There is a hesitation, a flicker, so brief I doubt it was there. I believe it's my mind playing tricks on me again.

Back to my book, my peace. It could be days again before I have another moment like this. Alone and yet surrounded.

The chaos returns like a wave crashing over me and leaving me gasping for air. The routine is unbroken. The groups swapped out, one chaos for another. I see a glimmer of my moment ahead.

Longing to get back to my book and chair, knowing I'll read nothing and I'll just sit.

I'm just getting ready to go in, back to my place when it's S.

We never have this much contact in a day. She is walking by me, but not in the normal way. Her head is down, eyes not looking, she walks right into my arm.

The startle for her, assulting. She jumps out of her skin, hardly looks at me, half shouts an appology.

In a total reaction, without thought, I take her arm and walk with her, into the small private office.

Suddenly, I'm the adult where she has always been. This is her domain and she commands it, yet I am now briefly in charge.

I close the door gently behind us. For a moment I stand there. Just leaning against the door. Wondering. Thinking.

She is at her desk. Sitting but defeated or crushed or somehow broken. Not like anything I've ever seen before. It's as startling as if I were seeing her in a fast food uniform this woman of command and power.

Strangly unsettling.

The Story Begins

So he said to her, all high and mighty, smug in his never ending success, "Just get over yourself already. I mean, come on, you're way past the age of success and you haven't even gotten started. Get on it. Just start. Try working at it just 15 minutes a day. But real work."

And so it began.

She spun on her heart and went back to her regular life. All the mundane that there is to live, she's living it. But at the back of her mind, there was the whisper.

The nag.

Did I miss it? Am I past the only jump at success I'll ever have?

Shouldn't I be able to stand here knee deep in a middle-American life and still have my chance even though I'm 20 years past the date? Couldn't I be late to my own party?

At 20 something I held only the loosest ideas of what or who I wanted to be and as the years have gone by and people have come and gone in my life, I'm seeing both more clearly and less clearly, exactly who or what I should have been or am capable of becoming. There is no place that holds more promise than the very moment you live in.

And why on earth put it all out here in the world, for all to see, don't know. Just going to work it that way.

I'm going to keep wasting words until I hit it. But my success will be mine, not determined by the outside. It won't come as a glimmer of fame or a mountain of titles, it won't be on a best seller list or on a most read list. Nope. Somehow, when the thing is finally written, I'll know that was the success. I'll know it just because.

Much like I've known love in my life. I know it the moment I meet it. No explanations will fit. No logic can define it or category hold it. There are simply people of all ages and sexes and races that walk into my life and I love them instantly. There are others I grow to love and plenty to be friends with, but those that bring love into my life.

So the woman, weary with her life, but wrapped up in joy at the very same time, sat her big butt down in front of the machine and began.

She began what would soon become the all encompassing next stretch of her journey in this life. And so it should be.

There are people around me in my life right now, realizing that the important things are sliding right on bye and they are being entirely sensible by being selfish. They are wisely stepping back from the things that are fun and wonderful and connecting and retreating to save those things that are in reality critical to them.

It is a wild and wondrous thing that she can type while looking out the window.

A strange gift and yet sometimes a curse.

Then the mind wanders faster than the words will hit paper.

Read me she screams and yet, let me never be seen. Comment and tell me what I want to hear, but more than that, tell me the truth. I can take it at this late age in my race. I can. That would be a good thing in this life, for if I'm on a wasted track, running a race I should never have put my shoes on for, then for all that is good in this world would someone please tell me, and I'll get out of the way on this track and let those who are fast and sleek run the race.

I'll go back to the sidelines and wander around some more. I'll dream and wonder, what am I really?

She wishes there had been an instruction book left in her life somewhere along the line. One that would have said at this time, turn left here, put on this career, this goal, this personality and go forth. For this will be the time of your success.

But no. It was not like that at all.

No. Instead it came down to this. A challenge.

Put your pen where your waste of time wondering lies and see what comes out.