How would God respond to making a mistake? Would planets collide or mountains slide into the sea? Or would the ledger of all life simply remain out kilter until a series of small events forced that ledger back into balance again? It's probably the l...
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today, June 1st
(27 days until 6/28)
Charon, when your eyes are closed, are you hunting for cold blue moons among your memories? Are you reaching out to touch the unreachable like Weat or even Ril? If you could talk to me right now, would you say that you're happy with the memories you have left in your brain?
Honestly, it's hard not to wonder what thoughts are still floating behind your eyelids. If there are memories left, I hope one of them is from June. Maybe from the longest day of the year. Or the hottest. Or a day when you felt the most loved and were the most unforgettable in someone else's eyes. A day where everything that happened gets pressed into a single memory – every word spoken, every step taken, every piece of gum stuck on every sidewalk, and the sound of every nickel bouncing on every floor. Because on a day like that, everything is worth remembering. And on awful days, everything gets pressed together to make those memories unforgettable.
Sometimes, you don't even realize it's happening until it's already behind you. That's what yesterday morning was like for me. When I got here, something seemed different. At first, it was just an uneasy feeling that I couldn't pin down. It was like a wrongway firefly buzzing around my face. But I thought about that feeling all afternoon and finally realized what it was. It was nothing really. It's just that there was no longer a stain on the wall above your bed. Someone (who knows who it was) had come in and wiped it clean. That's when I thought about the cats living inside my own brain: Ril's cats, my cats, Buddy Quisling's cats. They are the stains, the cold blue moons that I can never touch. They are the paw prints that cover every hill and every valley inside every folded corner of my brain.
You see, when cats die the stories you once told about them don't really exist in your memory anymore. Instead, they become stains on a wall above your bed. Or maybe they're a misplaced shoe, a shadow from the arm of a chair, the pattern of cracks in a wall that you never noticed before. They live on as broken reminders of their presence in your life. But not as specific stories because that's what dogs do. Dogs are moments. Special slobbering moments. Moments that bubble up in your mind from time to time. But cats are always. Always something. Always there and not there. They only leave when you finally leave this world. Some people are like that, too. They are a moment that starts and never ends. And they should mean nothing to you because the time you spent with them was so brief. And yet you never seem to be able to clean those stains off of your mind.
This story starts with a conversation that lasted just a moment in my life but (as brief as it was) it never ended for me. I met a man very early on a June morning. The man was resting on a park bench near where I lived. Since then, I've reached out to touch that memory too often to count. The man and I spoke for no more than a few seconds. Or maybe I was the only one who spoke. I can't really recall. That may surprise you since I just said that I've replayed this moment too often to count. But it wasn't the words in that moment that were so memorable. It was the feeling I had of knowing my proper place on Earth. My place that morning was supposed to be on the bench where the man was sitting. I was supposed to be alone and quietly thinking. But I wasn't alone because that man was in my place.
At that moment, I felt like all life could have been different if I had only had that time to myself. Not tiny different like dragonfly wings flapping in Cambodia but clearer and cleaner and utterly uncluttered. But maybe it's just one of the lies we tell ourselves so it's easier to wake up the next day. When we greet that new day, we hope that (somewhere in the future) there's another man and another park bench and another moment that will fix everything.
So now, Charon, I will tell you what could have happened (or maybe what should have happened) to that man. And also, I will tell you what happened to you, my dear one, because this is the happy (happy) story I have imagined for your life.
But for me (just for me), the beginning and end of this story is something else altogether because that man is like one of my cats. He is a cold blue moon that is always too far away to touch. He is my truly truly absolutely. And I am your inconspicuous starling.
