Write My Name Across the Sky

by Barbara O'Neal

Home. It’s a word as fraught as any I know, but this spot is one of my favorites in the world. Here, I can let the space ground me, hold me, give me some time to figure out what’s next in my mess of a life.

Men are a lot of trouble, honestly, and unlike many of my friends, I find no need to have one in my house, though I miss having one in my bed now and then.

But music is meant to be shared. It’s communication. The music itself taking life through an instrument or a voice, then reaching into the hearts and bodies of other people, and coming back. I never feel so alive as when I’m playing for people, with them. My heart lifts a little.

life is patterns, isn’t it? Patterns and routines create sanity where nothing else can.

Do you have to be young to be in love like that? Because I’ve never felt it since. Even now, the power of it can make my heart flutter.

I stop, a pain thudding through my chest so intensely that I’m worried for a moment that I might be having a heart attack. But I’m not. These are just the ordinary feelings of a woman remembering her great, lost love.

The great tragedy of aging is not the loss of the supple body but the illusions we are forced to leave behind, one after the other, like a string of pearls from a necklace. That all will be well, that dreams can come true, that we can always do what we wish, that sacrifice and sorrow are not inevitable.

My gift has always been an ability to be happy. It sounds small until you live in the world for a while.

Why do people put up with so much, or rather, why do they settle for so little?

There is more than one way to love a man the whole of your life.