Just for a Taste

There is a mysterious light which sometimes trickles through the caramel leaves in the trees, glistening my strawberry blond hair into a shimmery halo around my head. I’ve recently cut much of it off and now I’m waiting impatiently for it to grow back again because when I have it one way I always want it the other, such is the story of so many seemingly trivial things in my small little life which, to be honest, feels like it’s growing smaller and smaller with each passing day. As the years slide by, this strange life becomes more and more like looking through a keyhole that leads into a most heavenly garden: soft grass beneath bare feet, beautiful bodies caressing each other to ecstasy, ivory flowering vines, tiger butterflies and a perpetual sunset glow, if only you could open the door and step foot where you know you belong, or finally become so small that you could slip right through that tiny opening and disappear into someplace warm, welcoming, free of the mindless clutches of calendars and clocks. We are insatiable creatures. We want to hold tight to the lives we have for fear of the fall from grace, the fall from the esteem we hold in other people’s eyes, and yet we want a taste of the life that has been living alongside of us like a haunting, flowing like a stream you can admire from afar but cannot swim in. A life less organized but infinitely more honest, real, alive. There are choices you refuse to make.  There are dreams you have about chances to be brave and in those dreams your courage is reckless, wild, untamed, it is the pulse of the life not explored, not taken. It’s the hungriest pieces of yourself that you let fall away which come back to wake you in the dead of night. As I turn and pull the blankets up around my chin, the white unblinking eye of the harvest moon watches as I shudder at the first crisp night of another autumn curling itself around me in silence. I know I want too much and I know that is what keeps me at arm’s length from everybody else. It’s only the poets, the artists, the difficult, the sleepless, the shipwrecked who still believe in the whispers of what could be.  So many ghosts around my throat, so much time has passed and will I ever be more than this wandering woman, grasping for the hand of something with no name.