Waking to Here

The trees shake the sky into lightness.

The bows sway, the roosters crow, the wind hits the Airstream aluminum and rumbles the quiet of the night into waking.

I am already awake. I can’t sleep. Again. Thoughts ricochet around what it means to love, how to communicate with truth and empathy, about the necessity of touch and home and safety.

I sigh.

He stirs. 

He turns his body over towards me and talks in his sleep. He giggles (not even laughs; it is a bright boyish giggle) and murmurs about games and flight. I smile. My hand crawls onto his shoulder from my side of the bed. I can't not touch him. He is soft underneath the sheets, his skin a sea of pale warmth and subtle movement. It strikes me that much of what I see and feel is no longer living yet still attached to beauty: this shock of unruly hair, those fingernails absently scratching at a chafing layer of dry winter skin. What is alive? I stare at the small smile on his full lips, at the line of his jaw underneath a scruffy beard, at the thick lashes caging in those flickering, dreaming eyes. 

I want to know this person so deeply and I am terrified I never will. 

I actually know I won’t. 

I can’t. 

I’ve tried before, with this one, with others.

I’ve failed.

I’m over here and he’s over there. Inches away.

I breathe in his discarded breath and feel the atomic exchange giving me life on a different sort of cellular level. My lungs may not appreciate what my heart absorbs in the warm scent of him. 

This will have to be enough. 

I turn towards the light. I can see the trees clearly now, trunks reaching for frosty blue above. The birds orchestrate the early hours with song while we speak in whispers and gazes and touch. We eventually yawn and blink the day into being. Turn the insides out. I pull on my wool coat, my mud-crusted boots, a bag full of books and journals (unread, unwritten in the night before) and step down onto the dead-nettled ground.

“It feels like Maine!” I exclaim. He doesn’t respond, just stares at the brightening sky. 

A part of me shudders.  

I think he doesn’t understand. Doesn't care as I do. Doesn't know me.

Reminder: he doesn’t. He can't. He is not me.

I am over here and he is over there. Feet apart.

I constantly forget this. That this life I have lived can never be translated in a way that makes perfect sense to anyone else. That expecting anyone to fully know me (and me them) is as impossible as hearing and understanding every note of the birds' morning cacophony.  

And what the hell does that mean anyway, It feels like Maine? Because in this moment, right here in Washington, it actually feels like Washington. It can’t feel like anywhere else because this is where we are and that other place would feel different in a way that I will never know. That is what I think he would say even as he stares at the sunrise and maybe thinks of chickens and doesn't speak of Maine.

I am over here and Maine is over there. Thousands of miles away. 

I sigh again. I want to breathe in fresh winter air in a field of nettles surrounded by cedars and firs in the Pacific Northwest with a person I love, dammit, and stop my mind from spinning to different places and faces and times. Memories of memories. Quiet this mind that strives to identify and compare and quantify. Control.

This could be the most beautiful moment I have experienced in my life! And I could do that over and over again, every moment new and incomparable and inexplicably beautiful. 

(Is this what he would say next? Or is he still thinking about chickens? Nope, this is what I say next.)

I remind myself over and over that even if no one will every truly understand this inexplicable beauty circling in my heart I will keep communicating and continue to be curious about what is swirling in their hearts even if I will never understand the intricacies of their particular song. I will continue to bring my own version of this life into the world through words and images and voice. I will read and listen and ask questions to tease out meaning in what others carry and know that how I interpret it is unique to me. 

This is not pointless. This trying, this struggle, this unfolding of myself for others to see and feel even when I know no one will ever reach the core. I will live and dream and wake up at five in the morning to witness the sunrise of another day and I will try my hardest to be here, actually here in my own body next to another body, as the sun rises over the trees on a windy island in Washington. I will cultivate the curiosity to wonder at what the birds are saying and enjoy every mysterious and never-to-be-known note. And that is enough.