I’ll sit on a mountain and watch the clouds go by, cheer them on in my own quiet way. Their consistent drift over the horizon comforts me, even gives me courage at times. It’s productive to sit here and listen to the birds sing, I’ll lean in and almost make out the secrets they’re trying to whisper to me. Sometimes they’ll make me want to cry, overwhelmed by the sky to have the audacity to be so blue. I’m married to this dirt and these trees, I’m loyal to them. Our little meetings every afternoon.
I’m jealous of them too you know? Their secrets are so pure and holy, a tree knows how to be good, it knows how to grow up, I had to fight for that. Birds sing because they know how to let what’s in them go. I have to coax it out, beg my tongue to move. I feel almost a bit ashamed in their presence, how the secrets I whisper to them are usually dark and morose, an uneven exchange. Yet they never laugh or judge, just absorb them like they do the sun, dance in the wind, the trees shaking their leaves like some sort of funny dog asking for more.
I’ve spent a lot of time in quiet pale blue rooms trying to heal, as if I was looking for a sentence like a puzzle piece to make everything fall into place. You can’t really put things together in the dark, that’s not how this works.
It’s obvious to me now I needed a place to bleed, a little patch of earth I could court, something I could be honest with. I knew I was bleeding but I needed to see where the blood was pooling, I needed a place where it could all stop and congeal. It’s not like I hadn’t had some realizations before, but I hadn’t gone to a place that was big enough to hold those realizations with me. I needed to sit on a mountain top, the same mountain top, over and over to have things sutured into a bleeding heart. My eyes needed to consume the hungry waves of the pale blue ocean’s wet fingers thrumming against the shore, to think to the beat of wildness, to be consumed by beauty and spit back out covered in its slippery demise. I’ll walk off that mountain a little more myself, having given it something and taken something away.