The Best thing That Never Happened

Perhaps each day a woman falls under the spell of a man’s words and glances. She abandons herself to this onrush of love, clutching at her happiness as a child opens her arms to embrace the simplistic beauty of soul to whom the greater world is largely unknown.

Maybe even as the brightest hours in these fleeting days are overcast by the sadness of their imminent separation, the surrounding gloom only serves to make the love sweeter.  She had thought this kind of love impossible in the past and had believed it only existed fictitiously, to be read about in novels and poems. Holding hands, the couple disintegrates into the play of reflected light on the water opening out before them until all that remains is a mauve shadow of their shared memory that, bit by bit, begins to dissolve.

Your memory (guest post by Tess P)

Perhaps your memory is hazy as sea glass, smooth and etched into softer blues, subtle greens or chalky whites. The clarity of a window you passed long ago has faded. You remember church bells, the smell of basil, the day you found your car had been towed, but then the sun melts into the bay and here you are.

Maybe a bad memory is no memory at all, but a haunting. It could be a story someone told you, a newspaper column about a Japanese woman who died and was eaten by her cats, or the other stories you read for pleasure. Sometimes you wonder what’s behind that door you closed, the place where you came from, and then you're treading dark water. Your bad memory is like a stray dog that wanders off somewhere and once home, you think it may carry a disease or it must have ticks or fleas.

new year's prayer)

Perhaps you are alone beneath a cold moon. You cannot speak. The bitter wind has pierced your thin clothes. What is it like to find yourself cradled by only the faint glimmer of distant stars? To be the other half of a long, dark night? What is it like to relinquish the middle and the edge, the last and the first in this silent interlude of dust and thought while awaiting the new morning’s light, unable to filter out the extraneous and grasp the essential of the new direction you find yourself traveling toward?

Maybe as you venture out into the dawn, a bird is watching you from every treetop. Light floods your fingers, and faint heartbeats of the year’s first flowers speak your thoughts. You smile as you did in babyhood: a calm, blooming face haloed in brightness. Something divine lives in the shape of your eyes and the movements of your eyelids as, caught in the glow of all things golden – hillsides, shade trees and fields – you approach me, your skin sprinkled with the sun’s sweet afternoon.