Letters on the Wind
Sometimes you use your blog to help sort some stuff out in your head. I’ll be doing that for a little while, so stick with me, folks. Maybe it will help someone else out there in the mean time.
On that note….
There was once a time…no…there’s always a time, so let me begin by saying that I once had this habit the product of which was my random eruptions of treatise to the world. I wrote letters. They were never to anyone in particular, and I usually left them wherever I happen to be walking or waiting or feeling inspired.
Keep in mind, this was a long time ago. I miss this part of me.
Here’s the scene: In the middle of a busy grocery store, waiting on a very slow shopping partner, I wrote the following letter, tore it out of my notebook, and slid it between some sadly wilted roses.
Dear You,
Why do people feel the need to stick to the tradition of bouquets? I’d rather get a bouquet of butterflies, or even tiny pumpkins on a fall day. Why can’t I have a dozen places to wiggle my toes in the grass?
Do you ever find that the good traditions die and the boring ones propagate until no one knows why they wear white by the date or get eggs in April?
Sometimes I want a dozen ugly things so I can be the flower.
~Me
Circling back around to the checkout line, I saw a man with those same roses in his hand find the note. He read it then dropped the flowers back down into the water with all the other bundles and exited the store. I’m hoping my little dispatch didn’t cause too much trouble for the florist that year. It was the only one I ever saw delivered.
I wrote this one and watched the letters dissolve in my bath water.
Dear You,
I bathed in a tub of hot water and pristine white bubbles, the kind that crackle on your skin when you raise your knee from the water. I burned incense the scent of India flora, and watched the smoke curl around the air.
As it crossed the stream of water pouring from the faucet, for a moment I thought the liquid turned to haze and I had taken a bath of smoke.
~Me
I had no real purpose other than getting whatever was in my head at any given moment out into the open. I kept a second copy of most of the letters in an unremarkable notebook on the bottom shelf of my bookcase, where they were quite formally acquainted with The Longman Anthology of British Literature and The Collected Works of H.G. Wells.
Dear You,
There are days like this, where the sun is warm and the shadows are cool, that I sit in the middle of color and grey. I look at the sun shadow on my body and imagine my skin folding upwards into a thousand butterflies that greet the sky.
And then I want to fly away.
~Me
Maybe some part of me hoped that when I had something to say, someone out there was listening to me.
Dear You,
Did you know that there is a flower named after the stars? It’s called the Trientalis Borealis. It’s a small flower with six soft white petals that fold out, like a shooting star coming up from the earth instead of down from the skies.
As a little me, I watched the old Disney nature films. You know the ones with time-lapse flowers blooming and dying before you could appreciate that they existed? I would watch the bees visiting flower beds, announced by a narrator with a rumbling bee voice. I would see the seasons changing in a breath.
The Sumerians had it right when they worshiped downwards towards the earth. Life growing upwards and outwards, from the womb of the soil. It was the Babylonians and Egyptians that moved their eyes to worship the sky.
That’s why everything falls.
~Me
Dear You,
In the pit of my stomach, there’s a black nest where a night bird lays eggs with pieces of me inside them. The eggs are so blue they disappear in the sky, and the shells are hard like marble statues. Here, the darkness is liquid.
Is there anyone who knows how to reach into the waters and hold the eggs in their palm? Do they warm the shells, melting them? And when the eggs break open, will I know me again?
~Me
I wrote many letters to You and even cataloged them in an anonymous blog for a while. A Letter on the Wind, I’d named it. The occurrence didn’t settle in until later that I’d spent that time writing letters to myself. It just took a while for me to get them.
The time has possibly arrived for me to start writing them again.
