,leaving.

It’s August 31. It’s hot. A tingle starting in my shoulders shoots down my spine and then back up again in an uncontrollable shiver. It’s 100 degrees and I have the cold chills. I’m supposed to be sad, but my forelorn face is nothing more than a fasaud covering the releif that awaits at the end of this drive. I’m headed to the airport. I kiss her. I say I’ll see you later. I turn and walk away.

In my grandparents’ basement, in the room that is always cold, I sit, I write, as is my custom, the words flow throw my pen, the eruption of words is short-lived, I feel strange, I stop, I think, my thoughts wander from present to past to future to present, I know, tomorrow, it ends.

This feels like a waste. All this time that I spent. All this energy I exerted. I don’t understand this need. This never-satisfying need to love. And of course, to be loved. This search. This life. This wasted sense of never knowing what comes next. This emptiness that fills me when this ends and that only ends when this begins again.

She touches me. You know the feeling. At the end of her touch is a smile that awakens in me something that has been dead for too long. I wonder, could it be? She talks to me and I listen with true interest. It feels new. It feels like I’ve never felt like this before. I forget the months of hell, the waiting for it, the darkness that surrounds her face, the yelling, the misunderstanding, the weeping, the clouds that form in my face, the frustration. I forget. I walk hand in hers towards whatever is waiting.

I’m getting old, too old for this to end again. I sit in the sunset enjoying a beer. It seems that certain things are too far away to be truth. I choose to leave them where they are, buried deep in the recesses of my childhood, buried deep within the pages that I write, the ones that make me feel better, the ones that give me reason. She sits beside me, talking. I know that after all these years one of us is going to leave. The flower of our life is wilting and soon the petals will have all fallen, at least for one of us.

It’s May 2. And spring is leaving.