palace of winds

M’s out today so it’s quiet around here and I’ve switched to my exclusively Damien Rice playlist and he is weeping ‘Delicate’ and outside it is snowing. I stand for a minute in M’s office staring out the window with Damien soft in the background, and the snow doesn’t really seem to be coming down. Instead it is swirling and lifting and drifting, going up and around as much as down. Like someone has again given our snowglobe a little shake.

I wonder what Damien will mean to me one day. What he will take me back to. Earlier today I was listening to Rufus and he pulled me abruptly into the English woods waiting for spring, quiet green and full of moss and rich soil and reserved English dogs, and opening onto long golden fields and soft sun. And in a flash that one memory pulls up another, ten others, a thousand.

I kind of hate when people talk about the ‘best days’ of their lives. The ‘best time.’ Often it’s referring to high school or college or something, and it’s so — depressing. It’s like you’ve already made the decision that everything from there on out is downhill. And I don’t think you can know that, and I don’t think you should.

Sometimes I feel dangerously close to it, though, about Europe. Knowing I will never have that back again. Knowing it was impossibly golden and good. Knowing it was a thing too bright and big for my life. A stolen experience. A whole separate existence.

I know I will never have it again, but sometimes I’m a little afraid I will also never have anything like it. Anything that big and perfect. A pivot. A hinge. A point from which the rest of my life ever opens.

And how odd and melancholy-sounding this has become.