I've come here often over the past few months to find burnt-orange pears glaring at me, and a blackness so deep that to steal my voice it had only to swallow.
Spring was beginning the last time I broke through myself, and now July sits plumb with stillness and the silence of the subtle memories of previous summers.
When I try to write now, I am overwhelmed with the possible direction my words could take. There is no longer an audience, but an auditor, and I am that auditor. Words have precise places, and the pauses must be measured, measured, weighed.
Time has ceased to be indefinite.
We are paralleled only by years--a quarter of a century--and my story weighs so tragically on my ink-stained fingers that washing out the blackness is as insignificant as the wringing of Macbeth's anti-heroine's hands.
And so, this summer becomes a sponge--soaking up moisture and time so quickly that I do, indeed, forget to breathe. In the spaces between my words, there's my life: Emi, work, Bruce, my kitties, home, Maine, Ohio, my father's ever-failing health, my mother's ever-deeper descent.
And in the words between the spaces, I begin again.