In Route

Mid week the leaves are at their peak in fall.  The tree outside my office window is blazing red.  I can only catch a small glimpse past the roman shade.  It cast its shadow on the brick building across the way.  Once I was content here now I simply flow here.  In route to something different this is what I long for.  I miss the summer of my life.  I miss a different sort of wake up.  I miss so many things I never knew before.  Yet somehow I am learning that this missing means once I had something worth missing.  That is what I keep in my pocket, under my hat, stashed away beneath my bed.  That thing I won't repent for wouldn't take back. 

You think these things they won't affect you.  You think they won't touch you later can't touch you after.  But no they strangle you smother you consume you.  They build up walls around you.  High walls of tangled ivy of dragon breathed fire.  They become un-scalable mountains.  They create torpedoes out of the sea out of the vast sea that separates you from me. 

Many are the roads that we can take.  Narrow and wide are the pathes.  Short and tall are the doors and each one leading us somewhere.  Who would I be today if I had chosen another, that no one can tell.  Be certain life is brilliant.  Not fair, not without pain and certainly without reason.  But these leaves of vivid colors show me we are meant for change.

"What is it? My dear?"
"Ah, how can we bear it?"
"Bear what?"
"This.  For so short a time.  How can we sleep this time away?"
"We can be quiet together, and pretend - since it is only the beginning - that we have all the time in the world."
"And every day we shall have less.  And then none."
"Would you rather, therefore, have had nothing at all?"
"No.  This is where I have always been coming to.  Since my time began.  And when I go away from here, this will be the mid-point, to which everything ran, before, and from which everything will run.  But now, my love, we are here, we are now, and those other times are running elsewhere."  - A.S. Byatt, Possession

"She followed slowly, taking a long time,
as though there were some obstable in the way;
and yet: as though, once it was overcome,
she would be beyond all walking, and would fly.

- from Going Blind, Rainer Maria Rilke