When Was The Last Time I Was The Soft That Gets Things Done?

You never want to go back to sleep when you know she’s not coming with you. But you need it. You need the sleep. And she’ll be here with you when you wake up.

Here I am now watching this scene of perfection, whatever is turning in her fecund mind – I don’t know the meticulous workings – but I see it become beautiful music alive with hope and warmth. She decides she can’t play this one or that because she doesn’t play for people; I tell her I’m only one person. And I am only one, but I know when someone needs their space. It’s tough for me, music. It’s one of the things I can feel but can’t fully understand, yet. Maybe that’s why to me she is so incredibly captivating; I revere her with the same cosmic mystery that song has held in the minds of man since antiquity. She is a tune with an allure so strong I find the river rising, and like the Gift of the Nile, it has both the ability to destroy and create depending on what the great waters decide – Keeping my eyes wide, my ear to her earth, and my breath steady only ensures that I’ll be alive to sing when the waters come.

This is the part that stuck with me: Every time she rides that bicycle, when she goes to shift gears, she’ll think of me and my clumsy self sitting on her hardwood floor; hands black with the grease of exploration as I assure us both that I know what I’m doing. She laughs and I laugh. “I think that’s good,” I say with a wink. She moves to me and puts her hands in my hair. I don’t remember what she said, but it was probably something of gratitude. I don’t remember because I didn’t need words to know. No one disagrees that a thank you goes a long way, but she had something more, and it stuck with me; I still feel it as I imagine her changing gears with a smile – It did turn out good.

I don’t want to write about her in the past tense, so it must be the present participle since it is hard to deny her happening. She is taking place and unfolding with ecstatic curiosity like the flower that has well spent its’ time and effort as the bud – Blossom and open up. She is the perpetual expanding of nature in its’ unmarred soul, stronger than ever after all the winter frosts have tried to impede and steal away that spirit.

I remind again and again that I must remain vigilant, growing and breathing deep so I don’t lose the ground out from under me, so that I can meet the howling winds of erosion and speak sternly.