Sounds behind a curtain

This turned out to be a real old-fashioned stinker of a Monday. I often feel like I shouldn't complain when other people have it so much worse than I do, but then there is the fact that my experience is my experience, and life is not graded on a bell curve.

I have those longings that are so hard to describe, or even to put my finger on, where they reside, carving out that hollow space in my chest. I miss homes I haven't lived in, people I haven't ever met or have any hope of meeting. I miss abilities I don't possess and never will, except in dreams and stories.

My cat yowls a lot, almost like a wolf sometimes. I've never really known why, except now it occurs to me that maybe she is a bit my familiar. Maybe she, too, pines for things she can't express, other than in a nameless, plaintive howling.

Me, I get on my bike and ride aimlessly. Slowly, in some cases, and that apparently gets me yelled at by obnoxious teeny boppers on the bridge. God, that girl made me mad. At the time I just wanted her to go away, so I pulled on the brake to slow down even more so she'd be forced to go around me.

But later, I wanted to go back in time and throw her off her bike.

Instead, I watched Mary Poppins.

That Dick Van Dyke sure can leap about like a panther. I am not sure whether he's the model guy for me, or whether I simply want to be that character myself. I do a certain amount of leaping about when I have room to, on a given dance floor. I'm right good at it, too. Another one of those callings I've missed.

While I was eating this dinner, I had a strong knifelike pang, the kind that tells you this is a metaphor for something. This simple dinner - just pasta, olive oil, a clove of the world's most beautiful garlic from the winter farmer's market (itself a miracle - local garlic is generally three-quarters dead by this time of year) and some Tuscano kale (or "dinosaur kale" as the guy working the farm table called it). And just a very few leaves of fresh rosemary.

Honestly, you could make this in your sleep, and it was the best thing I ate today.

Something so pure about it - it just was what it was. It was like a tree. Trees are never anything but themselves; they don't take orders and they make no apologies for the bends in their branches, for their knotty trunks, their gnarls, their fine woody smell.

I've often wished for that certainty, that simple knowledge that up is up, and one's path is one's path, and one can and should simply sing one's own song and make no bones about it.

That girl on the bridge hurt me - it was like being in middle school, or even earlier, when words were weapons. I don't like people very much at all, some days.