Since I've Been Gone

To be honest about it I hadn't even noticed the widening gap there, how the space was growing between the time I wrote last and the time I wrote next. I was surprised when I finally thought, on the first day of this month, to pick up my morning pages journal and saw that its last scrawled entry was dated 3 July; surprised again when I looked around a little more and found, for instance, that was the same last date that I'd written anything here. Two months is a bad long time to go without writing, when you're a writer, and I wonder whether I shouldn't be punished for it -- although the commission of this particular crime really is a punishment all its own. When you neglect something you love, it comes out in your life in odd and insidious little ways; with me it manifests as a sideways sort of unease, the sense that I've forgotten something terribly important but am about to remember what, and that I'm going to be devastated when I finally get it back. Lots of things can wake me up too early in the morning, but since I've been gone, being on the verge of that memory is what has haunted me most during those long and patient hours.

Well, nothing stopped because I wasn't writing, other than my writing, but otherwise the Earth pretty much has kept to its course, dragging the rest of life right along with it. In fact life is the one thing that didn't stop at all, and since I've been gone it's changed enough that big parts of it aren't anything I recognize from even just a season ago. For instance I think to myself how the profile I wrote for this blog hardly fits me anymore, although it's anybody's guess how to change the thing to better reflect what the reality is now. At some point along the way I started to breathe again, just to give you an idea of how basic the changes are. Well, if you know me, you know all about that already, about the man I met, about the trials of our long-distance love affair, maybe you've already figured out that I'm thinking by now about how to transplant myself to yet another new environment, yet again. All of this has transpired across a span of fewer than six months, and the two months that I've been gone most of my energy has been given over to that. But don't think I'd forgotten about everything else. Times like these are part of the great mystery cycle of birth, death, and the transformation that comes in between. My deal with myself has always been to live with the silence that times of change bring, with the understanding that once they're assimilated, writing will come back through. All the while that I've been gone, I've been taking careful notes.

Since I've been gone, the Earth has curved around a bit somehow, so that now the nights are cool again and by mid-morning, I have to open all the windows and doors to warm the house, which has somehow retained the nighttime chill. Across the street Mrs. Gordon's cancer has come back, and by my side porch the goldenrod has grown up, and when I wander downstairs from my writing desk I like to look out and see those yellow heads as they unfurl in the noonday sun.