Patient for Sun-showers

You accept it when it comes. Clutch tight while you have it, but also have to accept when it's no longer yours. And we'd all like to think it's easy to know when to let go. But it's in all of the little blinks, the split seconds of oblivion that write themselves into the ether that we will never recover, that is where it can sneak right past you. Where the grip should naturally slacken, for all the missed cues and gaps. The hopes that we cannot mold ourselves. It slackens slowly until it all of a sudden breaks contact entirely- and off they walk. A beautiful stranger that you know like the back of your hands, or the underside of your tongue, or the spaces behind your earlobes. I've never been able to look away when their backs turn.

So there you sit.  And there they lie in all of you, inseparable once mixed like small crystals of sand. They fill the way you speak, cup the words you hear and align into the new DNA of what is "you." It's a cruel trick, honestly. You are forced to remember them and carry on what they deposit despite your best efforts… But maybe consolation comes from knowing you did the same.

 The first step toward your own path is the hardest. It's colder. Legs feel shaky, born into this new reality you fought to never revisit. But with time, the steps feel natural. The pieces left suspended in time carve out something sweeter… Or maybe kinder, if we're willing to see it through. And we pray that we see it through- through all the nights on docks, drinking wine and staring up at Texas constellations, through the late cruises, the shaking hands with mothers and befriending wary older brothers, all of it. We shake the ice at the bottom of yet another glass of liquor and swear to ourselves that it all must mean something. God I hope it does.

Wisdom is knowing that love is much more like a sun-shower than a breezy bright spring morning. All of the right pieces must align atop another, with just enough room here and there for it all to fall into place. And wherever that rain begins to fall through sunbeams, as if that weren't enough, you've also got to be standing right there at the center of it, not an exit too soon or a minute too late- looking up and tasting it on your tongue.
And if you’re extra extra lucky, that feeling will be enough. 

The wind shifts again- as it does. I know this because it feels the same every time. At once, one becomes acutely aware of the sensations that surround, and all the loose grips. And at once it all feels okay- painfully vulnerable, uncomfortably bittersweet, but okay. The kind of okay that makes you cry, even if you're not entirely sure why. It's a why and a thank you to God all at once. A prayer that only the skin on your knees ever see. A tightness in the chest that laughter and tears have in common.