The Magician

I've been hiding out recently, folding inward, tucking myself away as though I were readying for the winter. But it is summer, and the hot winds blowing into town are kicking up dust storms which blind us in the dead of night. The sky is huge, full of fat puffy clouds that drift lazily on the breeze, and I squint up at them and wonder if they are bringing rain or only teasing. The cicadas have come back to stay, planted firmly on dead branches and in our windows, droning on and on about the same old things. There seem to be more of them, louder, every night. My little house roasts in the heat of the afternoon, but by night it is cool and silent and seems to be dreamy, lost in thought; much wiser than I. Most evenings I sit in a spot with a good vantage point and study the house, thinking about how strange it will be to leave it in a month, wondering if it is healthy to be so attached to a building. I am a different woman today than I was when I first walked in its door 13 months ago. I suppose I am afraid that if I leave, all the moments I had in this house will vanish also, or be buried, and I will forever be sifting through sand to try and locate the faintest traces of them. as much as I wish to be out on the road, far, far away from responsibility and obligation, I worry that all the beautiful memories I have from this house will be the only ones I will ever have; or that if I make more, they will be born in a strange place, one that is not familiar or mine, and then how shall I revisit it and them when I please? and so I must remind myself that Love does not remain silent within concrete walls; nor does it peer out of windows and sigh wistfully on beautiful days. I shall weave it into my hair, roll it into a cigarette and light it, slip it into my boots, pack it into a car with a dog and an accordion and travel west with it. For in the desert and the mountains and in all the miles in between Love stirs from its drowsy nap, rife with dreams, and warms itself in the sun. There, the inky night sky is shot through with brilliant points and streaks of light, and it gently cradles us, as the harbor cradles ships and sirens. There we will speak openly, and our pupils will dilate and we will be freed; be free to lose ourselves and to be true. So we stick together, and we press on, and I sing and wail with the bellows sounding on street corners in cities I have never been before. I leave little pieces of myself in these places, dropped like feathers in their rivers and on their dusty roads, in hopes that they will take root there, or lithify.

So far it's all a dream, a violet dream whose jumping off point is just shy of 12 miles down a winding path to the sea. For there lie ends and beginnings, centers and continuances, and I will them to meld together and with a sigh relax in their embrace.
I eagerly await my visit to the house at the end of that path - not my own, but one I feel I already know intimately. Though, certainly, once its door has opened it would not matter if a house continued to stand there at all. It would only matter that you stood there smiling, expecting me.