Windows on the World

There are two windows in my bedroom and one of them opens out onto the back porch which overlooks the backyard and a clothesline and its green and the houses seem far away enough for me to breathe easily. I've just come from doing Free Laundry on campus and my clothesline is half full of my shirts and as I type I am watching them sway in the wind and hearing myself say to myself "all's right with the world".

Over the past two days i've been letting out an extended sigh of relief. At life, at my classes, at my relationships... and it's descending on me that this time is coming to an end, that i'm almost ready for the next jump. I am no longer in the great hurry I was in before. I get that if it all had to end right now i'd be happy with myself and how i've lived until now.

Now this is going to sound strange, maybe, but all i've wanted to do over the past few days is sit down and have a good cry. Not in a bad way. I've felt quite good for a long while now. I think it's over my cheerful aloneness.

Don't get me wrong. I have a lot of people who care for me greatly. I will never lack a shoulder, a word of reassurance, good company... any of that. It's not that I am lonely. I'm rarely lonely.

But I am alone. I am alone on the wind and the people and places keep changing as i'm carried along and where I lose friends and family I find new friends and surrogate families and I am one of the few constancies in my own life.

I love my family. But i've been apart from them for four years now and while the symbolic umbilical cord will always be, I've come so far away that often when I go home I feel like a stranger. I don't fit in with the Way of the family anymore, I don't have my seat in the car, the bedroom to sleep in and the chair to sit in at dinner. I left those all behind at 18 and now they have been taken away or given to others. I am a guest, a visitor.

And i'm OK with that.

The comfort comes from knowing one day i'll have it myself... my own family, a certain chair to sit in at dinner, a bedroom to sleep in next to someone I love for years and years and not knowing the whole time or worrying that I will be in a new bed in a few months, or lying next to someone else.

But i'm not there yet. Everything is in a constant state of flux and i've had three bedrooms in a less than a year, even more failed relationships and dead ends, and plans that just can't sit still. I look at the people around me now and I know that in a few months i'll say good-bye and i'll not see them for many months or years.

I've become awfully good at saying goodbye. I've had to do it voluntarily and involuntarily almost constantly over the past decade or so. Hello, good-bye, Hello.

But I understand it and accept it-- not with melancholy but with the same calmness with which I take on my days, on by one. I'm alone and i'm happy and I take care of myself and am taken care of by the right people are always in my life when they need to be and come and go as God sees fit.

It doesn't seem like much to cry about. But i've been fighting it all for so long that now that the relief is overwhelming. My arms are tired and i'm happy just to sit on that wind and float along and watch it all go by around me, passing me, through me.

I've come far and i'm still moving forward, whether i'm flying, floating, walking... or running.