8:31 A.M. - Tuesday, Apr. 01, 2008
Dancing with the cards
I woke up before the alarm and felt overwhelming loss, our house on the mountain, my job, personal trinkets I had from the time I was a kid were mixed with the avalanche of past defeat. Flash cards uncontrollably flipped through my mind as a series of events a place person or life as I knew lost its place in the shuffle. I found myself trying desperately to gather the cards and put them back in my safe memory place.

A memory card from long ago fluttered within my sight unleashing a multitude of reminiscences from childhood. Loss of a man that I recall adoring took my breath as a picture so clear that I felt he was standing in the room. This man, my Uncle I have seldom talked or written about. I studied these thoughts recalling a young girl who shouldered blame of loss for many years. I reasoned had I not made the trip to visit "time" would have been altered and he would not have been at the place that claimed his life. I kept remorse locked within as I made minds eye charts reenacting time as if I had not been with them that summer. I believed with all my heart my mere presence had altered turn of events. It was this point in time I was aware how fragile life was, a hug, see you later might be our last memory before we can blink. This was a first memory of attaching blame when things go astray to me, a pattern I have followed into adulthood.

I do not recall religious preference at that time in my life; I don't recall the series of evens after he lay comatose on the basement floor with a gun shot wound to his head. I recall screams, looking out the window my eyes fixed on ambulance lights, people racing everywhere, hiding in the bushes out back, and my cousins moving through the house like ghosts. I felt like the observer, I was invisible as I melted into the background memories of days/weeks following are forever lost. I traveled hundreds of miles back home with family but those actions fragmented in the shifting sands of time.

I lay in bed this morning wondering why this picture show of loss danced before me. Horses, our little farm, past marriage, loved ones having left before me, friends now at a distance. It felt as though much of my life has been scattered along roads I have traveled, memories caught in the wind, changed, altered.

I don't have a grasp on how I feel about the past or what I long for in the future. When I walk through my new place I feel nothing it is only when I gaze at the Lake do I feel something alive stirring within.

Memories, dreams, finding "me," tomorrow, are all interweaved with the now. Likes, dislikes are slowly coming to a boil in a kettle left on simmer for years. Some days I do nothing although my mind seldom sleeps, back and forth, shifting with the sands, dancing in the cards, or left lying in the dust.

Sandyz

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