chickadee

The small shabby room is crowded with books and animals, paw prints on the comforter, dust heavy on the shelves. A single lamp burns brightly enough, light spilling in through the doorway, the shadows shoved to the floor or up against a wall. The window is always open, and the cold wind hints and hollers as the rain goes away. The night walks through the walls. The night paces the halls. The night seizes my heart in its teeth. The days gone gray, the wings at work.

I’m always missing something. I always miss someone. It’s a lonesome way to be, a hard way to go. The mise en scène ever at a loss. This absence overflows, spilling into every facet that I figure, black clouds and blind furies. The world I observe and the world I feel too close for me to witness my own life reliably, each mood a different turn and a different tack. I am a stormy sea, and I seldom know what happened. My heart is full of holes, and my head is all angry hornets and bullet prayers. I just want to get my story straight.

Whoever you are, whatever you do, you miss a lot. The world is the busiest of bees. It’s hard enough keeping track of your own itinerary, let alone the schemes and doings of the sun moon and stars. We walk our beats, play our parts, hit our marks. We watch the wings we wish on, we speak of what we cannot know. The stories born of the story before. All our books and lore and the life we mistake for our own. A bird never witnessed sings a song never heard, the words come just the same. Pieces and parts and candy hearts. Why this bird? Why this sky? Why this hole in the center of my soul? The secrets I keep are the ones I do not know.