by M. Reed

Created on: August 23, 2008

My favorite window faces east. So I reflect at daybreak, inviting the fiery sky to ignite recollection. Then my heart rides the sun as it scales a jagged horizon.

The mountains below remind me of home, a home nearly eight hundred miles east, a home I left over three decades ago. It lies on the morning side of the Rockies, where thunderheads hang in a sapphire sky and endless acres of glistening grain waltz with the flaming wind, where late summer harvests send clouds of wheat dust billowing to the moon. That is where I was happiest and most at peace.

It is also where I learned the peculiar nature of feelings; how laughter, sorrow and satisfaction could all be felt in an instant...sans the sieve of self-doubt. It was a place where seeing myself through the eyes of others rarely occurred to me, let alone judging myself the same way, if at all. I was far too eager to learn how gentle to be while holding a baby bird, how frightened to be in the face of a lightening storm and how quiet to be while listening to my heart. As I close my eyes once again to hear the blood flow through, I still taste the tattered weed in my teeth, smell the fragrant ether of lilac in the morning, feel the moist and prickly meadow stroke my tender feet. This is how I first came to know myself.

That boy would not know me now. I have the belly of a middle aged man, a strange man who came when I wasn't looking and left it in trade for my hair. It is big, and it aches when I move about, just hanging, shifting and nagging me like an old woman who regrets her past. And, like so many adult conceits, it will not be wished away. No, I'm afraid the boy would not know me now.

But I would know him in an instant. I see him, head atilt, and I think he wants to quiz me accusingly about secrets we'd promised to keep. I try to oblige him, hoping for recognition, then desperately longing for his fickle mind to move on to the things we'd always known were somehow important, but could not understand: the infield fly rule, the height of the sky or the nocturnal cries of young lovers. I want to tell him what I have learned. But he is puzzled, frowning uncertainly at my grownup ways, ways shaped by parents, teachers, wives, bosses and barroom brawls.

I try to redeem myself, struggling to recall solemn promises made as we bathed in the fresh fallen leaves, winced at the rush of a cool autumn breeze or laughed at the joy of fresh pumpkin pie. But I see the glint in his eye, then falter, knowing that look as I do. It means he suspects the worst, that our promises have all been broken.

I suspect he sighs over this. I know I do. But he sighs over what he thinks never was. I cry as I open the dusty old door of my past, knowing it's taken too long to greet him.

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