May 2005 Archives

It's a balmy evening in Texas, humid and quiet without even a hint of breeze, under a waxing gibbous moon. It's a perfect evening for a barbecue, for stargazing, or for cold drinks with friends. It's strange to remember that it was only three weeks ago, exactly three weeks ago as I write this, that I was shivering on a chilly hill country evening, counting shooting stars, and speaking of everything and nothing. Time has a strange way of expanding and contracting at will.

I'm struck by the ephemeral nature of it all. Memories can be so fleeting, and even the ones I've learned by heart have this tendency to morph into something slightly different, into some imagined reality, not so far from the actual one, yet not quite close enough to suit me. I can still remember the taste of his lips, but it's fading much faster than I'd like. I have photos to remind me of the contours of his face, but they don't show his expressions, or the way his eyes light up when he smiles.

I have this sense lately that even when I'm all by myself, I'm never entirely alone anymore, as though I'm carrying with me an extra set of eyes, to which I wish to show everything I see. And in my imagination, at least, I can do that. I can explain the relative comfort of a balmy May evening when sweat drips down my back long after nightfall, and how much of a relief it is after the heat of the day that precedes it, and how the salt on my skin is tied to the salt in the Gulf that I call home, and the salt in my blood, and how it's all part of me. In my imagination, this is all sufficient, but I can't explain it in real life, not with all the words in the world, from two thousand miles away.

The challenge in all of this is learning to embrace the present, to live fully and learn from today, instead of wistfully longing for the future or trying to recreate the past, but realizing that makes it no easier. So I've been planning, I, who hate to plan anything, lest I box myself into a corner. I've been planning three months ahead, six months ahead, a year ahead, because it gives me a sense of control over all the uncertainty, and it gives me something to do in the meantime, something to make me appreciate the present, as I look ahead to the future.

For now, impatient and restless though I am, I can let that be enough.

It's one thing to look forward to something when you have no idea exactly what to expect.

It's quite another to look forward to something when you know precisely what you're waiting for.

August is too far away.

I've been adding onto my Impractical Life Plan -- the one where I retire at 30 and go gallivanting about. In a whimsical and impractical sense, my amended plan is looking pretty doable, though it's still very much in the early planning stages.

More to come, I suppose.

Truth be told, it was a few days before I knew it for sure.

In the weeks leading up to that evening, I'd alternated between overplanning and underplanning, but going to Enchanted Rock for an evening of camping and stargazing remained tentatively on the agenda, even while I was sick. And so it was that after an afternoon of chatting with the Texanest Texans ever to populate Texas, we found ourselves worn out and a bit vertiginous on the smooth granite dome of Enchanted Rock at dusk, where we gazed out over the rolling hill country and watched day fade into evening.

And so it was that we descended the dome as shadows began to fall upon the land and made our way back to the campsite, where deer lined the path so numerous as to be almost unbelievable, and we stopped to gaze at them quietly before heading off on our way.

And so it was that we opened a tarp out on the ground, on a little clearing nearby, and spread out a sleeping bag and gazed up at the night sky and the ever-growing number of stars as a chill spread over the land. Between us, we counted seven shooting stars, making little wishes for each of them, each of them morphing into tiny prayers that seemed to float upward and into the infinity above us. And we sat there, wrapped in bunnyhugs, talking of everything and nothing until the Big Dipper had rotated in the sky and our eyes would stay open no more.

And that's when I realized that it was the perfect evening, that for that amount of time, there was no place I'd rather be and no one I'd rather be with, even as I shivered in the chilly night.

That's when I knew it for sure.