who can see behind my tears?

I am at work, waiting for my last client. Tears pool and leak while my mind probes the tender spots, seeking for reasons. Sometimes I find none. That can be hormones. But today thoughts of a stillborn baby many years ago surface easily. I notice that many lonely memories and feelings of being lost and misjudged rise and dissipate as though connected on a string, like the tail of a kite.

I remind myself that feelings can't kill me. That it's not how you feel that really matters, it is how you are.

Feelings are funny like that. I don't want to ignore them, but I don't need them blowing me all over the map either. So, like Stacy said, I sit with them. I roll them around in my mind, feel their contours, witness the parade of memories. But I don't dive in, not anymore, thank god!

Lonely. My inbox is empty. I check, restlessly, and feel the sharp disappointment like a thump on my chest. My twentieth anniversary remains unmarked, with my husband on call. In eight days I mourn the distant loss of a baby I never knew, a baby I buried beneath a redbud tree, which later died. No marker remains. Even the soft little mound is gone.

She was so tiny, so fragile. She looked like a little old person, beautiful and translucent, a little fairy-child who never drew a breath, never saw the sun or heard laughter, or music. We will never know why. I opted to bring her home, rather than send her tiny body in for an autopsy. I couldn't bear the thought. And what would it change, really?

I have few shoulders to cry on. Probably a good thing, cause I am a soppy mess right now. I am heart-close with one young lady who is an amazing wordsmit, brilliant and troubled, but she is half my age and I don't run with her crowd. We have a mentoring relationship and I am the crone, obviously.

But that is not friendship, is it.

I don't understand why I am so alone. People seem to like me okay, and I'm not too hard on the eyes. I'm a little hard to talk to, maybe, but I try to accommodate that. I don't really need to talk so much. I don't mind pretending my mouth is full, or looking preoccupied to give people a graceful exit.

It's funny, because I rarely feel lonely. But today I do. Maybe because I never notice I am alone until I need someone. Oblivious, like usual. Oh so independent, maybe.

Well, I am in good company, I guess. I just wish they were closer! What's an old woman got to do for some distraction around here!

so we begin

I worry that Stacy will bolt. Hell, I am worried I will bolt. It is a bold thing we do, to attempt to weave a relationship in this rarified shell of the digisphere. To question without mercy our own perceptions, and to ask and accept feedback ceaselessly, inching our way out of the cloister of habituated fear until we burst free, into some space as yet unimagined, some wild frontier for our accelerated, perfectly reflective and digitized minds to romp and scatter and congeal into non-local aggregates that will soon wield a global weight capable of shutting the whole mother-fucker down. Period. This is not a possibility to be blithely ignored, nor a power to be approached without the utmost respect and a continually refined discernment.

Already little flickers of fear leap to the dry tinder of my words. How will they be received? What gauze will separate the blood from the bone? Can I sit with the ambiguity and keep my hand steady on the tiller, even though I can hear the waterfall and fear certain doom?

No battle of yore is mightier than the battle for my own sanity in this sea of seas.

Stacy, where are you? Are you okay? Just busy? I know you are dreadfully busy... Your silence is a hole where my day unravels, as my mind persistently seeks your answer, repeatedly checks my g-mail and comes away feeling unsettled.

My age-old fears crowd forward to fill the vacuum, and I imagine I have once again pushed too hard, overstepped my bounds. How in the world is a person supposed to be able to figure out those squidgy lines when everybody occupies the center of a uniquely configured perimeter? There is no one lock and key...

No longer as hungry as in my youth, the fear that my neediness shows still niggles at me. Am I marked with some scarlet letter on my forehead, unbeknownst to my inward-eyes? Is there some invisible force-field that repels people? A neon-sign blinking "Run! Run for your lives!"?

Well, sigh. The truth unfolds in its own time.

My mind lingers on the memory of your picture, Stacy, the one of you dancing as a child. Something in her tiny spirit calls me, something eerily wan, calling from some lissome glen, from a deep reflecting pool. She sits upon the mossy bank, trailing thin, translucent fingers in the rippling sky. Her eyes appear to wonder if anyone will find her here. She has been still as a mouse. There has been no sign of a search, no shouting, sweating men or frantic hounds. The churchbell sounded in the distance on the hour and the half like an ordinary day.

She did not intend to be forgotten. She only wanted to heal. She thought someone would notice she was gone.

And this is the quicksilver inner-surface of my perception. Only Stacy can assess the alloy. The proof is in her pudding, so to speak, and hers alone. Until then it is a plate spinning, a circuit broken, a program seeking, a dog sweeping the brush for the one that got away...

One of many things I may never, never know. And here I find a potential for tears.

I become increasingly aware of how exponentially what was once assumed to be known falls away. Like the stars in our apparent space, each hurtling inexplicably from one another, hence expanding the boundaries of an infinite space.

Boundaries of an infinite space, snort! Damn paradox. Always pops up, right in the middle of everything. Like that stupid anomoly inside every black hole. They say.

Nonetheless, the luxury of knowing is never mine. But that does not excuse ignorance. Never is ignorance bliss.