love letters

The Fox and the Pine

When I found you I didn't know, left you hidden behind a bright light that might be a metaphor anywhere else. But not here. 

You drove south for two weeks, and in that time I built another life out of mistakes I crafted every dawn. Here a wrong word, and there a wrong move, and here the wrong heart.

How many times is it possible to forget the truth? I built an altar to an alternate, prayed to become worthy of a lie. 

For twenty-three years I had carved my life into stone, and here I dropped the chisel and grabbed a mallet. Each blow left me so certain I would find the ideal within. Each blow left so much less, fractured my life into ragged edges and fine dust. 

How lucky I was, that my wrong life was a series of eclipses, each shorter and shorter than the last, that I dove for your light like a moth, flying on wings ragged as old parchment. 

To find another is a journey, and I set on it unprepared. There is a compass in my head, and a compass in my heart, and a compass in my feet, and when I lost you, they all trembled and spun like autumn leaves in a storm. 

When the darkness passed, I aligned them using mirrors and sunlight and the fog of my breath, let the needles point sharp and true. 

My feet carried me to you. I lay in the quiet, under gnarled plum trees, light stippled onto my skin. I breathed, and allowed myself to break through the stone. There are other ways of being.

You were not hidden by the light. I was not swallowed by the dark. We were a marriage of the two, a night lit bright by constellations with names whispered by the wind. 

I am the fox, and you are the pine tree, and I take shelter in a hollow at your roots.  You describe the sky, and I tell you what lies at the edges of the world.

I found you, and I found you again, and as I rebuild, with moss and dew, I know  I will find you always, and still.