all the glow without the shine

Have you ever been sitting still long enough for your entire life to well up in swells around you, rocking you back and forth, lulling you to sleep with the sound of every love that ever held comfort? I have been there today-- to the place where the rainbow starts producing sugared gum drops, the candy sliding down the arc onto the other side of the world. It's realizing that light reflecting from his eyes is actually coming from you. Some mornings, life wakes us up to flip us onto our backs and leave our legs fumbling for ground, and others we are awoken simply so we can be reminded of what it was like to sleep. Yet no matter the reason, there is no getting around the fact that until you let it disappear, hope returns every morning to give you another chance. And greater than hope-- love, and luck, glamour and self-tanners. Now, wrapped up into a pill we could make a million dollars, but I am much more fond of the hair flip...wait...look...just there. And that was worth the loss to wait for.

It's moments like those when the sun catches the undercurrent of her curls that I am reminded why I find life always stalking me. Each moment holds for me the beauty of the one before, and the moments highlighted with friends and flings are like snapshot images of emotion, brought back by the location of the proper three-ring divider. I hear the first straining notes of a former love song, and I'm in a 15-year-old's body again, staring at a red jeep and wondering how, when I was that age, I could have thought that that the world would always be described by one soundtrack.

Or how when I was 16 I thought that the only love I needed could be shown on one hand and in capital letters, and when that failed, I searched through Ginsburg's psalms, and still found only the eyes of a forlorn lover scribbled down on a purple sticky note a year later.

Or 17 and scared. How I could lie in one place so long when the entire world was crashing down and soaring away again? Of course, it was all in the illusion of a jet airplane, but I still wished for it not to crash. But crash it did, taking out the greater Chicago fleet. If they could have felt my heart stop beating every time they jostled the baggage, maybe they wouldn't have overloaded the planes. Lying in their watery graves, I'm sure they're thinking about the same flimsy paperback book I read every year since fifth grade. Rehasing the part about the berries, or was it bark?

At 18, I was some sort of chicken. Not to be stuffed or plucked. A chicken to set in the middle of the lake with several swans, led to believe that I am a Canadian goose. It isn't until after I miss the flying V that I realize how hopeless a case with crutches is. Yet after treading on, I wonder if I've started to hear things, drunken comments whispered just before bed and forgotten in the morning. I had kept them waiting for two years, yet I only waited long enough to establish my post before backing out through the bars.

But finally, at 19, I'm a figure sketched into the sand, a piper tied to her rat pack, and a mile marker along the way lit by tradition. I'm the heavy eyelids that droop off from exhaustion and from knowing what happens when I wake up tomorrow.

I will still be riding in these waves. Waiting for my shooting start to shortly arrive. Thinking up the best wish and floating with it in the middle of the green brimy sea.