Cool Breeze

Today when I was outside waiting for my (uh, second) espresso, I got still so I could feel the breeze. It was a miraculous July afternoon where the afternoon was cool, and the breeze was something I felt I might be able to dip into and drink if I got quiet enough. It was that close to water. Soft. Chilled. 

There was a woman sitting with an older man at a table more than six feet away from me. She was talking on the phone and he was staring off at the road. He saw me looking at him and he looked at me. I wished I were older so I could go over there and take his hand and walk him away from that chatty person who might have been his caretaker or his daughter but who was too busy talking to someone else to talk to him, and so he was there at a grocery store’s café table in the middle of a pandemic without a mask on, drinking coffee with no one to talk to.

I wondered if he had things he wanted to say or if he had used up his words and was as happy as I was just to feel the breeze.

He was wearing a white shirt and looked like he might have been strong when he was younger. Maybe he was still strong. He had beautiful eyes. I would have married him just for his eyes, but the rest of him would have come along also, and that was too much for me, and so I went back to feeling the breeze.

 It turned out someone had taken my espresso, so I got to stand there for a while before the barista (or I) noticed I wasn’t drinking anything. I discovered that if I got very still all my borders disappeared and I became the breeze. I noticed that when I had a thought the breeze would get stuck on its way through me, so I tried to stand there thoughtlessly so the breeze could pass straight through me.

Years and years and years ago when I worked at The Ground Round as a waitress, one of the cooks used to call me Cool Breeze. I never understood why he called me this, but I thought it sounded nice. He could have called me so many worse things.

I had a dream last night that I went in to feed the chickens, and when the black and white one ran up to me, my heart opened to her. It was like my rib cage had dissolved and my heart was  open, unafraid, curious. In my dream I thought, So this is what an open heart feels like. This is love. Then, in my dream, my brother appeared and he helped me throw a blanket over Old Chicken so we could rub CBD oil on her feet. The next thing I knew my brother and I were racing for the door and I tried to cheat and push him, but he still beat me. 

Just like life. 

I do believe we are what we are looking for. I do believe we don’t need to be healed. I do believe we are perfect.  

I wrote a short book yesterday about pooping and writing and I went to bed euphoric because I realized my pencil is a #2. All things are delicately interconnected. I could not sleep for hours because I was so wound up. 

 I’m going to try to publish it within a week. 

I’m racing with myself because it’s fun. 

The less I think about what you think, the more fun I have.

But I still love you.

In fact, the less I think about what you think, the more I love you!