I was walking along the road that was leading into the distance that was not aware to me. How dare was I to set a foot on the land that was foreign to me? To think about its sacristy, I must stripe off my layers, my hoods, my socks, standing barely in the water, on the shore, by the road, and upon every encounter with the traffic. In the warmth of the day, I could smell the sweetness of the rotten blackberries next to my path. The wind spoke gently, and birds and bugs put their words on the table. I was walking as usual, or pretending usual, singing as loud as silence.
If the road did lead to somewhere, could that be where my going were destinated to be? I passed by doors (half-closed), entrances (said welcome but shut), hills (people coming up and doing down), sideways (nothing special), and turns where the shadows of trees ended and the shapes of light shifted, twinkled. I saw the leaf falling from the un-named branch, and did it matter if it was still breathing the breaths of summer? How long did I have to stand to become a tree? How long did I have to stay to become a bridge? I was caught in between the motions of reaching and falling, earning resolutions.
I was lost, in a place that was beyond any map or chart could arrive. I stepped into confusion from the roads to the garden, where wasps buzzing around busy stealing the cake crumbles, crickets mating in the log pile, birds, many kinds of birds, hidden in the bushes, hopping out in black, blunt silhouettes onto the trees of which I could not define.
Everything has its directions of growing. So what were the differences if I took this side of the road instead of the others? I was, and am, lost as soon as I walked down the road. The rest was just the process of realization. I longed magic encounters with everything passing by, with their cars and bikes, with the radio reporting about the hurricane Dorian, with their seed planting in the backyards, with their birth suits, rising through the surfaces and walking out of the water.
I have no rational love for this longing or the silence I am sitting within. Returning from lost to not where I've started but where I've stopped doesn't give me a second chance of understanding. Speaking in terms of restoration, lost in the process is my process of lost. At the first light of darkness, I wrote the blank on the empty pages.
(2019.09.02)