Five Act

As I sent you through the void, Good thing it's a five act. & Acts I and V are both hello's to the unknowns. I'll not - cannot - recant, you know. Won't say otherwise any more than I'll say the sky's below me (though atop a peak, it sometimes is), no more than I'll say this blood isn't shared (though we've as many differences as the same), no more than I'll deny that your sea is also mine (but how different the tides!). These past few weeks I've been finding bridges I'd long ago thought charred to smoky ruin somehow still standing, and I'm discovering anew that so many of the silences I mistook for goodbyes are, in truth, perhaps just a reminder in how to say hello. I am the me I am still meeting seems a phrase from a lifetime ago. More accurately, several of them. A half-dozen homes ago? But the distance doesn't make the sentiment less true. For that matter: we all, aren't we?

Home's a notion, a plaything I've been toying with. Natural enough, I suppose, given that in some sense that's precisely the place to which I'll soon be returning, and yet, yet. I'd posit home's just as much a third act we all saw coming only in hindsight, home's precisely the sort of truth we're most ill-suited for until we've already long ago accepted it. Or maybe I'm just especially poor at settling down and still, who am I to say?

Another idea: the things that shouldn't make me laugh most often do. The truck that tapped Proud Mary's rear wheel yesterday morning's ride in, all too glad to help me slide across the broken glass I'd hoped to avoid (another flat); the teen that a half-hour later whisper's faggot just loud enough as I walk by with my morning coffee, because clearly to be different is to be gay; the dude at the stoplight a few days earlier who leaned out to helpfully inform me that I "look like I'm trying to be a goddamn woman" with my hair so long. Oh, the humor of this place.

But it's the mountains, I think, that make it funny. It's the mountains that make it a home, that are the escape. The students are great, too, sure - but most of all, the mountains make the place my own. Miles and miles and miles, these mountains. I'll run and ride and ride and run, and these jackasses I share the valley with? Well. They stay in the valley. And in the mountains I'll laugh at all of it and float on the sunshine and slide in the mud and survey the miles and miles and miles below me, in so many directions. And I'll wonder at all the me's those jackasses are never going to meet.

So many hello's to so many unknowns. So many. And I can't help but wonder: why'd we ever want to make any of it easy anyways? That's not who we are.