Life, Scattered

It was fatigue that brought me to this place, that and the realization I didn't want to spend the evening in the company of strangers emitting a haze of genteel desperation.  That's why I closed the door, turned on my heels and sat down to listen to the wind.

No television news tonight, too impatient of the bother it brings.  An excess of talking heads, and mine the loudest even when my mouth is shut.  The radio, too, began to grate.  The songs were good, but far too many seem to be mining my heart, seeking out the lodes of "lost love and loneliness" as I recalled Johnny Cash singing over the stereo.  I soon turned it off.

It's windy, a gusty evening a-swirl with the breathing of giants buffeting the windows.  Oddly enough, it is a comforting sound, here in this my new (old) house.  I hear the limbs of the trees rub against each other, and the dry bone scrape of leaves tumbling upon themselves and the sidewalk.  That scraping sound.  Sometimes it reminds me of all the pages of a life, ripped from the spine and cast about while we humans flail and gambol trying to catch them before they get away.  But we never will get them all back.  So we make new books from old pages, misnumbered, out of order, brown and ragged at the edges.

This isn't so bad, sometimes.  I often take comfort in the facing of the pages in a closed book, those older ones with the sepia cast and the rough edges that don't quite align.  they make a good book, all the same.

Dammit.  I gave myself five minutes to write about the wind and here I am at triple that.  To be expected, I suppose.  I was distracted by a thought, many thoughts, some about you.  Because the wind, it still whispers your name.

I left the radio off, and the television.  Tonight, it was the wind gifting me memories, and that was enough.