Sipping the Tea

Coming home has been the strangest thing. We're supposed to be moving out and Linda's moving in. Which is just fine. I like her very much.

I don't know when the house will get sold, but... something in me wants it to get sold, and soon. Something has been building lately - a desperate need to shed, to cast off the old skin.

I was packing and saw how many useless things I own. Everything I keep has a time and place, a memory, but some of these memories are choking me now, anchoring me down.

I was on the beach with my best friend last night. We made jokes and watched the clouds roll by and the stars come out. At four AM when I drove home, I was so very, very calm - as though I'd entered the heart of the storm of my life, and looking up through the windy, gray tunnel I saw the sky was indeed blue, the sun still shines.

She wrote a note today online to old friends. To one of them that was not me she said, "You will always be my best friend." I was jealous and more than a little hurt. To all these old friends she used to have before I came, she wrote and wrote... I know I can't be apart of everything. I don't want to be.

Suddenly, I wondered if that would be me. In the notes to the old ones. "Where did you go? Do you remember when we laid on the beach and watched the stars and scared ourselves when we saw that face in the clouds... Why do things have to end, why can't we all carry on despite all the change..."

And I will say, in the words of Peter S. Beagle, "There are no happy endings, because nothing ends."

Truly, nothing ends. And she writes to these people wondering where they'd gone - they were there all along, and not the same, certainly different, certainly changed, but still themselves.

I cling to all these things as if in apology for growing older (though not up, for I'll always be a child at heart) - I owe them nothing. If anything , I owe it to them to let go, to let them pass away into new hands to change and grow, to reach a new place in themselves.

There are things that must be kept, and things that I must, for a time, put away. Velveteen Rabbit.

We all need to, once and while, revisit the attic of our minds, to sift through the dust and survey, with sight blurred by tears, memories, and in our memories feelings awaken and who is now practically a stranger becomes once again a best friend.

When the reminiscing ends we leave the sepia world behind and step back into one that is that much brigher, and become that much wiser.

And I will be at the table, gazing out at the sea with a blanket in my hand and a story in my eyes, and then I'll rise and turn to her and take her dusty hand in mine and continue living.