She lay the heart gently into the box. It beat once, twice more, sighing itself to sleep.

They’d been so good together, a partnership better than anything she’d ever dreamed. She smiled, remembering how it used to sing within her, driving the bland, bleary world into a kaleidoscope of brilliant lights.

Nothing would be as joyful as those days. Never would she feel that way again.

She closed the box and turned to the window. Steel gray clouds covered the sky, dotting her skin with rain.

Her hand passed before her face, first left, then right, wiping everything away.

Time to go.

I gave her everything I had.

She didn’t ask for much, but when she asked it, I took a look myself. I thought about my life, my situation, where I was going, and how – for once – I had handful of coins in my pocket that, for 6 months I had intended to put into the cup holder in my car but kept forgetting.

My memory. My awkwardness. My self-perception. My inability to meet expectations, to feel satisfied with what I say and do to others.

She looked at me with a friendly smile, and it was all I needed.

I’ll give her everything, because it’s worth much more than 47 cents to me to feel – for a moment – that I am not alone.

She reminds me of myself at that age: naive, disguising her insecurities with bravado. She’s tied her armor on with twine and tape, a shell so close to blowing away with the slightest wind. Her greatest fear lies in the world not accepting her for what she is, unsure of who she wants to be.

I’ll whisper that it will be OK, that after failure and hardship, loss and rejection, she’ll become someone she’s proud to know.

I am the ghost, she said, her voice as hollow as the halls around her.

She rubbed one cold hand across her face, redolent of the leaves outside that danced on the wind once more before their earthbound rot. Her skin was so pale, thirsting for sun, an alabaster not yet willing to part from warmth and light.

I knew there would be nothing left of her when the world awoke.

One day I will live another dream.

One day, when the stars align and every stone has been set just right, perhaps I could take that leap of faith.

There is the conundrum: the older you are, the more things you promise to do. We are given a fixed number of mornings to open our eyes and yet awareness continually breeds intent.

It’s exponential. It’s backwards.

Know good people. Work close to your heart. Explore yourself. Discover your strengths. These are precious dreams that hardly every person lives to attain, and I feel gifted that I’ve found these things so close to home.

People shake their heads and say, “Don’t work too hard,” and they don’t really get why I let work become my life. I don’t expect them to understand. But I also want to be sure that when I am finally ready to go that I have something left in my life apart from this, and that I can look back and say that I took every chance I had.

Some relationships never let you go.

In a past life (my first life), I was caught in such a spectrum of heartfelt emotions, much too soon to understand the significance of the thrall. It was heady at times, and frustrating, and in many ways abusive and dysfunctional.

I grew, I learned, I was humbled.

A musician understands the pain and the beauty of channeling a voice borne from wood and rosin. In the awkward stages of schooling, there is little but tears, anger, and questions of self-worth. But there is something so beautiful just out of reach, a token you try so hard to grasp. The reward that you experience in fleeting glimpses – that is worth the fight.

When it’s right, it’s so right. Music is more than vibrations in the air. It is a physical expression of one’s soul. It is a strange sister to singing and to dance, and the attainment of uniting the inside and outside of one’s perception is the most difficult aspiration.

I might never get that back, but I am the wiser for having known it.

I found the following on one of many abandoned scratch pads:

I woke up afraid of death.

And through the course of the day I realized that age is a powerful thing. It can control you, defeat you, tempt you, and lead you astray. It is a commander and a charlatan all in one.

The dance of life is not knowing what lies through that door, and taking a journey that will, in many ways, never end.

When did I write it? What was I going for? Was I finished? Losing my vision of a piece of writing defeats the whole purpose of blogging.