spiral.

"Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving."
Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky

what? no sweet potatoes?

discussing plans for thanksgiving with my mom recently, i was surprised at some of the dishes on the menu, and shocked at some of the omissions. it didn't even occur to me to inquire about the menu earlier; it was the one i had grown up with, so no need to ask, right?

oh, how wrong i was, and the error wholly one of my memory. all those years on my own, planning and preparing thanksgiving dinner for my husband and i, i felt secure in the knowledge of which dishes were family traditions and which were personal innovations. the reality is that i had conflated several holiday menus, serving forth a mish-mash cobbled together from a child's imperfect recollections.

it's not a crisis. the dishes that end up on the holiday table are immaterial to the true enjoyment of the occasion (we even dabbled with lasagne there for awhile), but it's curious to run headlong into the fraility of one's own memory. how much of what i recall actually happened in that fashion, and how much is the reconstructed story i have told myself all these long years?

we each live in our own fairytale, and see the world around us in terms unique to our own inner languages. we each speak to ourselves in a dialect strange and unusual to others. never assume you understand the other. you may be mistranslating their word for sweater with your word for chicken, or thinking you will be eating cranberry sauce when all that will be on the table is a cranberry jello salad.

but how wonderful to think one can be a tourist without even packing a bag, just by listening closely to the conversation of one's companions, just by comparing memories of shared events. we can each of us be an adventure to the other, and each of us an ambassador.

non sequitur.

did you ever want to start over?

and then maybe everything would finally be good, would finally fit, would finally be the way you always thought it would be.

haunted.

you're scaring me.

don't go.

don't go.

(if there's a path i take every day through blogbelieve it's this: the castle to catch up, then here to see who stopped by, then yours just to see, just to make sure, just because.
i'm sorry if that's too much, but that's how it is.
home, here, you.)

occult.

There are things we don't speak of.
But inside is a landscape,
all the long hollows filled
with a rising restless ocean.
And the satellite
that conducts
its ebb and
tide is
you.