Mirrors and Smoke

Another day slides open outside my window. The deep night sky giving way to a new navy blue dawn as little lights begin to flicker on all around the neighborhood. The smell of coffee rouses my sleepy senses and I head to the kitchen for a cup, my bare feet suddenly cold against the hard wooden floor.

In the days that come, we can expect warmer weather, or so they claim, but growing up around here you know the first few days of spring can be a tease. We once had six feet of snow in April back when I was in high school. The weather, like a life of its own, is a gamble.

I’m heavy into editing some of my older works dating back about a year and a half. It’s hard to believe I have written over five hundred pieces on this site and that some of them are even half decent. Some are about me, some are about other people, some are not about me but claim to be. When you write, you sort of walk a blurred line between truth and untruth, fiction and non-fiction. Sometimes you simply run over it altogether.

Creativity can mean bold but it can also mean disguise. You can tell a thing, and swear by it, and all the while be building a case against it at the very same time. Which is not to say that I’m not telling the truth, but rather only to say that you may or may not ever know.

This is why you should not fall in love with writers. They are impossible to understand. They are impossible to pin down, to penetrate. I once saw a woman author on Twitter completely annihilate some poor sap who claimed to have deep feelings of connection to her because he felt through her confessional writings that he understood her as intimately as he thought he understood himself.

The trouble there is that we are all strangers on the internet. We are all making this shit up to some degree all the time. We build an image, conjure up a fantasy. Love is just a word and relationships are distorted because we have constructed a world which feeds on insecurity and loneliness, and then turns them into currency.

As I write all of this to you, I can see little birds and squirrels coming alive in the early morning light. Soaring from tree top to tree top in the frigid winter air, running up and down the big thick trunks. A pink haze is blending in with the powder blue horizon, like a pastel drawing, or a painting.

There are the dreams we think we can reach out and touch if only we had the nerve. People we think we know because they seem to wear their hearts on their sleeves and bleed on the page for all the world to read. But it is so much trickier than that these days.

So often, maybe too often, what you get is not what you see.

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Photo by Ilona Panych