leftover sun

By this age, I'm tired of everything I would have said, so I don't always bother. Besides which, I've said so many stupid things for so many years. Everything has echoes of something else in it. I go to the grocery store and I'm in two stores at once. Back behind my thoughts, I'm twelve, walking in the grocery store with Mom. I notice there's more of everything in the store in present tense. Plus, Mom's not here. But sometimes, I wish there was just the one store.




I wish I could wake up and the day was something different.

Now, look at that foolishness. You see? That's sixty. I didn't talk that kind of craziness at forty. Also, at forty, I'd sometimes remember something someone said but it was all in passing. I didn't pay attention to any of it.

Now? I hear all the judgments all the way back to my first grade teacher. Now, they sort of freeze me in place. Makes me want to get rid of everything I have and unplug from everything and be a hermit.

Or... I don't know.... maybe go become someone else.

Let's make some radical wishes.

wish one: go back -- but this time know what I'm doing
wish two: be someone other than me (simply because I'm tired of everything I'd do, say, or be)
wish three: I'd like to see the sun the way it shone two or three times in my life that I can recall very clearly. Who knew even the sun had decades. The sun in the sixties wasn't like the sun now.
wish four: I wish every day was new and nothing reminded me of anything else

Awhile back, I lost that "in-story" kind of being and nothing was as exciting after that.

Another thing. I'm tired of being practical. That's why I'm writing this. Got to get out of that local mindset. How boring. I need to read Sark again or smoke weed or something. Maybe dye my hair and get a tattoo.

That's so midlife -- and I'm so past that. I'm sixty.  I'd do what stereotypical sixty-year-olds do, knit, spin, bake.... but I've already done all that. Frankly Scarlette, I'm bored. And only boring people get bored. Maybe I really do need to dye my hair and get a tattoo.

But I don't. What I want is brand new snapshots to fill up my mind. Reboot. Everytime some fleeting bit of past comes through, I need to toss it out the window and go find something going on right now. I lived my first twenty years waiting, my second twenty looking back to the first twenty and the third twenty looking back to the second twenty. It's time to stop being afraid of my age. I'm not fragile -- never was.

I've got to throwout that leftover sun and go walk in the rain until the new sun comes out again. When it does, it doesn't need to remind me of when I was ten, or when I walked in a college town in the sixties with a boy who had guitar over his shoulder, or when the kids were little and the road was country sand with dandelions in the middle, or like the sun in a dozen little towns we stopped in, or... or... or...

leftover sun. That's the trouble right there.

And right here's where I want to come up with something upbeat and talk about a brand new sun so it doesn't sound like I'm depressed. Which I'm not. So it sounds like I'm hopefull. Which I am. So I don't sound so damn sixty.

But there you go. You only get to be who you are. And that's enough. The next twenty, I'll be learning that.