Beautiful Mess

To be honest, I don't understand my need to keep moving. I don't. I had a home, a good one for all my formative years. I'm not running from anything...I think. There are always visits. If I have the chance to return. If they still love me enough to accept the proposition. If they're not mad that I left. If they care as little as they did in the first place.

Here we are.


I leave on Monday to fly back home to chicago, get on a train the next morning for carbondale, then figure something out. There has been no rhythm to my sleep patterns since I bought that plane ticket. I go to bed worrying, I wake up worrying. Ok, maybe not worrying. Sometimes planning. Sometimes dreaming. Often lecturing to my "daughter", some lame manifestation of my past mistakes that I'm still having trouble laughing off. I wake up counseling friends I haven't spoken to in years. Defending myself. The yellow pine cabin is quiet at night. My head I never found a way to silence. Most of the time I don't have a reason to.


I'll miss the mountain sunflowers. I'll miss all the wildflowers. I'll miss the dead ponderosa pine they chopped down two days ago. I'll miss its silhouette on a 6pm sky as I rediscover the salty deliciousness of canned beans at Mark and Marcia's kitchen table. I'll miss the water falling over the large rock just under the suspension bridge and the way it sounded like ocean waves curling through the plastic slats of my RV's kitchen shade. I'll miss the way tetley tea with soy milk would get me out of bed in the morning. I'll miss those mornings I would get nauseous from drinking too much of it as I screwed around on the internet, listening to Morning Edition. I'll miss the crescendo of coyotes in the middle of the night, a battle of angry puppies. I'll miss laying on my left side to see the stars, my right side a midnight moon. I'll miss the aspen. I'll miss the strangeness of this country. The way the mountains seem enormous but so touchable. The way they look two dimensional against the sky, as if they were painted right on the set backdrop. The way one constantly compares them to the appalachians...as if putting their lover up against the one that they really love, have always loved, with the one they will never tell.


I'll miss wondering whats next until I'm missing what I just left.