I've become so habituated to turning to word as recourse for when emotional deluges overwhelm. It often seems as if all I am filled with is heartbreak, grief and misery, and that may be a fault of mine when it comes to writing. Though I am inclined to think otherwise (it is almost as interesting to witness the many ways audience decide to judge or assume based on what they read; how they interpret your art; the many ways it almost interprets the interpreter - but these deep thoughts are for another day alas), I do recognize that I haven't been writing when I am in love with the moment, and to that pregnant pause I assert, there have been many.
It might have been, for example, when I got onto the wrong bus somehow, by accident, last Friday. Living on the edge of a conservation park, I have to navigate a number of different regional transits, so when I hopped off one after sleeping the whole way through, I might have been still half asleep when I boarded the next bus. And instead of taking me all the way to the downtown core as it was meant to do, it started going north, and then a little more north. I, snug at my usual elevated back of the bus corner seat by the window, just kept listening to my music, letting the quiet morning sun shine beatifically on me as I shone my own beatific smile back, as I stayed on the whole route until the end terminus, whereupon I hopped onto the train to speed back downtown.
Or it might have been that evening when I trudged on my long walk through the snow, where the whole world seemed perfectly blue hued: the sky, the snow, the air itself. That moment when it isn't exactly dark yet, and yet the sun has bid adieu. Again, living where I do, I have to hike through a number of quiet suburban streets, cut through a few alleys and parks before I get home. Considering that there've been those moments when that same path holds past memories of sharp cutting minus 30 degree painful tearful heartbreaking walks, the ability to walk over that same past and rewrite it, superimpose the ghosts with new emotions is exhilarating.
It might have been that early quiet morning, when suddenly it feels like spring, when the air isn't cutting cold slaps, but a balmy, almost lazy, playful thing, when I could literally walk outside with my hair still damp and feel the thrill of having the wind's fingers intertwine with my hair and tug it gently, where walking into that mellow yellow light, the sky is filled with a long line of a hundred Canadian geese, perfectly linear and yet collectively a whole.
It might have been discovering that one song that so perfectly fills your heart with an ineffable feeling of joy, a joy that is never pure joy but brushed upon with all those gleams of silvery sorrow. And the impurity is not ugly, it almost makes the feeling greater, heightened, and you know that no one else can ever feel the greatness of this feeling. Or turning the pages of a writer you cannot believe you had to date never discovered, and absolutely ecstatic in being able to feel like the poetry itself. Or remembering that your own patience is the key to it all, and that it is OK to feel less than perfect, that it is OK to be broken, that it is OK to feel sad or unhappy, that you can be everything that you are, whatever that is and that is absolutely perfectly fine.
