There are things not worth wishing for. Wish too hard and you never get it. It's like watching the tea kettle, waiting for the water to boil. Maybe I'm crazy. I'm still emotionally attached to the little girl I used to be, praying every night for the unattainable. If you gain it and it's a gypsy in the internal sense, wandering always, know that it's already lost before it's gained. Anyway, bridges are for burning and wishes are a waste of breath.
How many times will it take for me to learn the lesson? Ad infinitum. I'll never learn. Foolishness is congenital. Incurable. I am yet another victim of the great lottery: a born fool, destined to be dealt out the lessons of consequences-for-actions and to never learn. I learn the theory but not the reality. Hope clings to me like North to South. The magnetic field falls into pretty pictures on the slide. Something within me halts, finds the pattern, stands on the pieces, mimics the image, becomes the pattern of field on the slide. Only there are no opposites attracting. It is only me, myself, and I.
My essence splits down the middle. Call it a soul. I unzip towards the ground and pool there but am still lost. In the background, music plays. Turning up the volume doesn't work anymore. I need something stronger. Wind, rain, a storm. A chance to get hit by lightning. To increase my chances, I climb up a tree. I remember buckets of warm rain, drops the size of fists, bigger. When it begins, I act against protocol; I step out barefoot. I run through the charged air.
Everything is quiet. What is left of me reaches down, connects the zipper, zips me back up. Soul is back together with a hole through the middle. No--it's more serious than that. No overt blemish. Millions of pinholes adding up all over the place. No defined spot. If I were a dress and a tailor looked over me, the holes would declare me unsalvageable. I am rootless. But this gives me the chance to plant myself anywhere....I can't. I'm unable. The roots won't stick. The ground's not right. The road is the only comfortable constant and there is only one reliable thing I've ever found.
Do you want to know me? I'll ask. How can you know the way I felt on a mountain at sunset with a gypsy knowing and not knowing, pleading with his eyes, trying to say what couldn't be said, so he said it anyway and then took it back? How can you know what it is to stare into the sun and not see a thing? To know without a doubt, with absolutely certainty more than you've ever known anything and to be enlightened--it's all wrong. Trust nothing. The greatest truth is a lie up on the mountain with a gypsy claiming soulmates and me reaching out with one hand on a midnight road, doubting, but trusting anyway because I'm the one with the blindfold on and sometimes there's no choice. How can you know my Loneliness? The years of emotion that you can't feel? How can you know how I converted darkness into light just to survive because the congenital foolishness compels me to hope against chance so I hope and I keep on going despite everything? How can you know?
So I say "Take me with you" and it's foolish. I've gone half way around the world and gotten nowhere. I'm stuck in stone. My soul unzips and zips back, always in place. If there's anything I'm not, it's not a wanderer. Forget the physical movement. I go everywhere, rip through roads and airspace. Not once, not once have I moved an inch.
