Your Song

I am on the plane (ok, I am typing something I hand wrote on the plane...). I am leaving Buenos Aires and suddenly the whole world seems slippery. It has rained for two days but somehow the water has not warped even the smallest part of me. Somehow I remain, am recalled, walking in circles: storming Florida street with my latest sigh (though I slightly like ending up, again, at this edge not of reason but of reasonableness), crashing back into the life I left behind. Silence is not easy...the mind's uncertain storm. However, my mind is more easily paralyzed by the pouring not of skies but the pouring, pounding of my own predictability. Now, I know how I have hurt (a hundred ways). Some days, somehow, someways I know why.

I hate goodbyes, as I hate volcanoes, heights, burning my tongue. I am afraid to return, more than anything else (in every sense of returning). I am afraid of going back (to too many beginnings and middles and messy endings). I am afraid I could belong here, was made to run and roar and rock the boat. I am afraid, no matter where I am, that I will always be somewhere farther and farther away.

What does it mean to go back, when you know, when everyone knows you were escaping, inhabiting a world not your own for some kind of sanctuary or safety, from too long a raging rain? I LOVE this city (sorry Julie, I know your opinions lie somewhere else :) ). I love this whole face of the world (now I know you are there with me on this one...).

I have outrun the rain. I have shivered at the side of streets. I have craned my neck to the sky, a more than plastic or paper crane, my own 1000 wings or wild ways aflutter inside. I have conquered (ok, not fallen off of) a volcano, in terror. I have held new friends tight, fallen asleep under the low, wide ceilings that make me warm and the too tall, interrupting the stars. I have embraced a coffee substitution (not forever) and dutifully doubted the chocolate, wrestled open a hobbit door, run on slate-gray pebbles, failed to resist, sunk my toes into an ocean, high boots, wet sand, laps, other lions' lares.

Sometimes the world, change, luck, offers you the opportunity to breathe, to amaze and be amazed in the maze of life. It is an opportunity for grace *not prayer, simply the sense of surviving. It is circles, I tell you. Lying in bed, my last day in Buenos Aires, back in the same hostel, dressed in my same pajamas, Enya (in Nicole's music collection) interrupts my thoughts. It is just like Christmas in mom's room--I am home. No wonder there are pine trees everywhere.

This is no miracle, grace is something softer, the cooing baby of miracles that snorts and snores and sighs. It may disappoint but it does its duty in healing.