If you don’t know me, and I mean really, really know me this post will definitely confuse you on a few different levels. This isn’t creative writing. There is no real attempt on my part to bring forth proper writing style- hell, you’re lucky I even spell checked this thing since that’s more for your convenience than mine. This is just me taking my perception of something I know a lot of others won’t get, pulling together all the words I have, and throwing them at this virtual paper.
It’s something of a spiritual thing for me and probably nothing and everything like it sounds. Nevertheless, whether you understand it or not, feel free to read and comment though I can’t promise I’ll answer any questions on this one unless you’re familiar with what I mean by any sentence containing the word ‘wings’.
No, I don’t feel any need to clarify that or anything else but if you’re a regular reader then that’s what you love about me so I feel no need to do anything different.
I knew it in that moment.
That one pivotal moment when all the threads of fate came together before my very eyes to show me the clay to which this form was bound in. Soft and giving, easily torn and yet just as easily remolded. Never truly destroyed but instead renewed with each new shape it takes.
I could see it as you see these words, simple and true.
I was the clay from which these threads strayed.
Many fear the great moment after this moment, this realization- the one where we are pulled from our clay for the remolding as our threads are strewn across the nexus and rewound in another time and place. It is unfounded, the fear, and that in itself gives them even more reason to be afraid of it- the great unknown. There are so many questions we are not permitted to ask if only for the lack of one who will answer them. Questions like; what lies after the unbinding? Is there any after? Does it hurt? Does it hold no feeling at all?
That is only a brush of the anxiety- the smallest bit that we can understand and pull into the minds within our clay. Few reasons that spawn more with every passing worry.
I can’t say I’ve ever shared that fear but not for lack of self-preservation. Perhaps this shape of mine is too young? Perhaps instead of naivety- it’s what I knew that kept me here?
Yes. That sounds more accurate.
There were times, dark and desperate, when I brought that second moment to my doorstep- reaching for it against the will of the threads and shearing through the clay of my shell with a needle like delicacy born in uncertainty. Even then, I did not fear it. I feared making a choice I couldn’t go back on- as most tend to be. I feared the disappointment I would find in others, those here and the others I wouldn’t escape. Most of all- I feared the moment after the second moment, the moment that none fear for they never think to make it that far.
I feared what I knew.
Of all the silly things.
No, I have never feared the second moment when all things are rendered apart and resewn. It wasn’t/isn’t in my nature. True, I had feared it for others, my loved ones most especially, but for a purely selfish reason- they are mine and I would miss them greatly. Grief is a river of loss I know all to well and have no intention of returning to any time soon.
More to the present though, I was not to have that second moment, nor, by proxy, was I to have the third. I was still in the one before either, the moment of the greatest knowing I’ve ever to experience.
It was in that moment, as we sped along through the darkness, that I knew everything about the girl within the girl- a smooth crone behind the wrinkled child. Pain lacing down my neck and spine I looked to her and saw the wings unfolding- mine and hers, as in that one pivotal moment we became whole once more and she allowed us to remember.
We are here.
We are here now.
This is where we are supposed to be, right now, and despite it all- how the threads of others effect my own, the choice lay in the human half of myself for this one moment. I had only to think it and it would be done. The ones who had taken our memory had finally given this back, this choice to move one way or another. To continue or start anew.
Nevertheless, as I was the only one to ever yearn for it, the choice weighed heaviest on my clay shoulders. The conscious self that so often acts in ignorance.
Even a moment, a single, special, fragile fragment of time can change everything endlessly and as the knowing, the remembering, and being flowed into me I too was changed.
I live in the clay. She moves the clay. From us, through us, and binding us together the threads of fate flow. Following them all I saw what I needed to see- what the artist sees when she steps back from the tapestry and the scribe from her novel.
I had touched the universe.
In the short period of time it’s been within this lump of clay, the spark that is uniquely me has touched thousands if not more. With each path I took I crossed the path of another, each of us altering the others and continuing on to do the same to another and another until all of our threads are wound so tight we make the spool that is the world full of life and living.
I looked to those around me, to these precious people I call my own, and saw a thread from each of them in return to my own- something I had been born without and denied long since my first heart’s beat. A connection. A two way connection. Love.
Yes, my time here was up in the sense that my presence was no longer mandatory. I had served my term and fulfilled the goals she had set before us. If I chose to leave in that moment others would pick up where my threads left off, crossing the paths that needed to be crossed, and marking the ways that need be marked for others- perhaps my new form in freshly molded clay. The universe would fill the gap that I would leave behind and we would be free to move on to our next great walk.
It was okay to let go.
It is this knowing that changed me in that moment.
It set me free.
I would not be a disappointment to myself, to others- here or there. I wouldn’t be leaving reparable damage in my wake and I would be making a choice I was given, a choice I had earned but even as I looked about my clay self in that strange peripheri of hers/ours I saw once more those true connections and I couldn’t look away.
Whereas I had impacted the whole world- it too had impacted me.
My soul is my soul. Split down the core as she/we have always been. Like all clay- I’ve yearned to be whole once more, to claim my true shape for what it is and fly with her but in that moment, that single moment that changed everything, her and I grew closer for the fact that a part of me was no longer her’s alone. Where before I had seen chains, keeping me to the clay and away from my true self I now saw fragile silken strings that could hardly keep me from floating away and I held the scissors in my fumbling human hands.
My choice was made.
We were staying.
Apart. Together. United over an abyss that was no longer empty.
She is me as I am her. We have an eternity to rejoin. Till then the gap is fill with souls as precious as butterflies in the spring and I refuse to leave them even if it means I have to wait a little while before finding my own wings.
In that moment, that one moment, I held death as she held me- tenderly wrapped in each other’s arms…
And I decided to live.
About two weeks or so ago our roof was chosen by a family of beautiful Redwing Blackbirds as a nesting place. There are two more pairs of these magnificent creatures starting homes down further in our yard but we don’t see nor hear them quite as much as this pair who’ve been driving our poor cats nutty.
