Quiet. Everything is rested like a weight at the horizon, pulling toward the dirt. Almost like you can tell the earth is heavy, dense, and round, the weightless invisible air lying above it. Faint children laughing. It’s a field in the morning. It’s empty. The sun grabs the entire land like a protective hand. And the birds don’t know I’m watching. I can see them. Birds always fly away the second they’re seen. I wonder what it would take to be so connected to the dirt that they wouldn’t mind our gaze. I look around the field. There’s been a drought and the grass has grown yellow, faded, fenced off at every end. The gravel road puts up a palm to the grass, as if it wants it to stay. Stay, but what if it could run? What did it look like when the grass just ran and ran, straight to the lake… how far could you see… It’s so silent–? It’s too silent–has the grass been hearing this blinding silence? Every step I take I feel the grass’ stomachs ache needfully with gratitude, hugging around my shoe like it’s an old friend they know must soon leave again. I think the grass misses the hands and feet of the children. The grass is thirsty. They don’t know they’re not alone. I feel memories of each blade smiling, dressed in their best green, not individually, but collectively, just for them. They’d close their eyes and give their lives with a laugh to the child that pulled them up to the sky. And what’s more is the feeling. The feeling of the children, a feeling I’d forgotten that I’ve forgotten: Here. Here. They didn’t have to do anything. They didn’t need to. No deadlines, no pressures, no demands. Just think. Just imagine. Just explore. Don’t think just do. Just mess around. You don’t have to be anything. Just be. Just live. Just dream. You couldn’t know so you had to figure out. You had to play, you had to live. Anything you wanted, months and months, all yours. All yours… The grass leads me to the trunk of a tree. Do trees look different when they plant themselves? When they aren’t planned out, mapped out, with irrigation systems, rods to keep them straight, upright. They cut the branches that grow over sidewalks, stop the roots from hugging pipes because /that’s not how it’s supposed to be/. From the top of this tree I would have the same view as that bug sitting atop that blade of grass. The bug wouldn’t care that my view is bigger than his, because they’re the same. They’re the same. The bug resembles a bright speck of dust when he flies off the blade. I forgot the sun could be this pretty. I remember days as a kid, walking in parks and riding my bike, feeling like a pool of water was in the air, in my mind, on the horizon, refreshing the edges of my existence. It’s so far away, where did it go? Where did it all go? Where did dreams go, where did sight go? Where did real go? I know. I know where it went. It went nowhere. It’s been here. It will be here. But it will be forgotten like months put into filmstrips. We’ll mask it, we’ll build buildings around it, we’ll make plastic as a distraction; beauty’s impostor colored up, cashed out, caved in. We’ll fake smile and say nice things we don’t mean, put kindness over love just because it’s socially acceptable. We’ll be so busy burning, finding loopholes in the corruption of courts that real beauty has no choice but to stay in the closet. Unseen. Sold maybe. Discarded in some ways. Disintegrating. Growing yellow. Growing thirsty. Thirsty, wishing for the day when a child can wake enough to rake through the water on the damp grass with their fingerprints, the sun biting an orange lamp into the back of their hands, the shadows, blue with the sky’s rush of echo. I have hope. I have hope for the few souls who can parent without having been parented. Who can rediscover early breath. Who can stand here in the footprints I didn’t make. They’ll be lonely but they’ll carry on our legacy. Our magic. And sometimes we’ll find each other, soul bleeding into soul, saying all the things we could never say–we couldn’t say because those words grew over sidewalks and around pipes. And though riddled with pain and aching, ours will be the beauty of life. Ours will be the sun, the stars, the broken languages, the green grass, the colored filmstrips. It’s not so lonely then, soft and friendly persons blurred across sunsets reaching out to share the field with you. You reach out too; you will forever, to the souls that echo yours. You walk on holy ground, forever with the brave, the broken, the emotional. And somehow, this isn’t more of something. This is less of something. And sometimes that makes you cry. But the beauty isn’t in the place, it’s in the door. They just have to find it. They just have to step out. And if they do they’ll hear it. They’ll hear this. This ongoing transatlantic symphony. This closet with no walls. And maybe the most beautiful part is that either way, it goes on. Has been going on. Will be going on. And finally, something lasts forever.
