One Page #19

Before I saw them coming I turned several circles in the yard with my arms outstretched and my face raised toward the sunshine that filtered in through my mostly closed lashes. As I passed around and around I saw the sun fly by between my lashes that stood like bars between my self and the sky and blurred the tree branches and the crows that were flying around first one way and then another as if they couldn’t make up their minds about which direction they were headed. I don’t blame them. Finding direction, choosing direction, is nearly impossible. You are always going one way or another way, but changing course is inevitable and sometimes the most exciting part, but it is the long stretches of moving only forward, not to the right or left, just straight on, that is easy but boring and makes my eye lids droop low and my eyes cast downwards toward the grass where I nearly miss a branch that would have caught on my pant legs and held on tight like it’s life depended on my forward motion but just then I decided to swerve and I missed the branch and instead flew off to the left where the lawn slopped down towards the pond and as I neared it, still spinning slowly in circles, I saw the ripples on the surface of the water coming towards me like the wind and they passed in and out of my view as I spun around and I thought that maybe I would fall in. But I didn’t. I stopped instead because I was getting dizzy and the ripples were catching the sunlight in just the right way so that with each ripple I could see just for a second the glint of the sun and then it disappeared and rolled into the next ripple where I saw the same glint of the sun, except it wasn’t exactly the same because no ripple is exactly alike, even though they look awfully similar. I wonder if the sun is the same sun, maybe with each ripple a new sun is reflected until there are so many suns and so many ripples that I am drowning, and I am nearly halfway drowned when I see them coming. And I stop and watch them come across the lawn towards me. They are holding hands and I wonder whether her skin is still as smooth as the rock that is warm in my pocket and has two parallel lines that run in circles around the surface of the rock. The lines are white and the rock is a dark green-gray and the white lines divide the green-gray into three sections that are all different sizes, but the middle one is the smallest because the two white lines are close together, almost like they want to be touching but are scared to because touch is scary, so I don’t blame them for keeping to themselves. The hands that are clutching each other arrive, with two bodies, and two grinning faces that meet mine. But I am not smiling, not just yet anyway.