Mumbles

It's cold tonight. Seriously cold, like snow-is-coming cold. Only eleven and the frost is already settling on parked cars and unsuspecting shrubbery. The clouds of steam that are the backdrop of my words find company in a light foggy mist which hangs over the parking lot and dances in the rays of a streetlight. Yes, winter is coming. In my mind, fall is relegated mainly just to October. I notice her then, feeling the breeze that smells of woodsmoke and football. Shorter days and dimmer sun are a perfect setting for birthdays and walks and writing and books. Silent conversations between intimate friends and long drives spent with music far gentler then the heavy beats of summer. But now...now the wind stings my cheeks and creeps slowly into my bones. The trees are bare and, for a while, their life has left us to rest.

A solo guitar finger-picks in the back of my imagination and I sway to its gentle rhythm. A long , black dress swishes along a hardwood floor and my steps click with perfect time. It's just us under a blue spotlight haze, everything dark and everything quiet...just a solo guitar and our own spirits to guide us. We should be happy in this place - and we are.

Together, a piano and a cello sing mournfully across the sewer. And she picks her ears from the mud to listen. The notes that echo through the pipes carry a new sense. A new stench in this haven of filth. Does she feel it? Does it frighten her? It is hope. Hope has no place here in the gutter. It stings and blurs like sweat in an eye. So different, such a sharp edge - but so sweet a feeling. Embrace hope, don't fear that "this" is all there is. Have hope that even in all of "this" there is joy and there is peace.

Words that are easily dropped: hope, joy, peace. What do they mean to you? Really, tell me. Not sunday school answers, and I don't care about webster. What do they mean to you? Maybe they mean a story or a scene from your life or a passage from a book. That's okay. Joy to me is a white speedboat racing across the bay. I'm sitting in the back of the boat with my friends feeling flecks of seaspray on my face and singing The Space Between along with Dave Matthews on the radio. Whenever I am really completely happy, that is what I go back to. For me, that's it. What about you?