You still can’t hear them.
It’s all right. It’s still all right. You never can. We know that, we always have. You still look at us like we’re crazy. We’re not, we never have been; any more than you are.
It’s easier, we know, for you not to believe that.
But I’m amongst them this year, this is their town, their night, their time. You can’t hear them, but we can. I can. They don’t soothe, they don’t cajole. They batter like birds caught in a cage…voices carried on the wind, just out of reach, just out of hearing.
But there, none the less. Always there.
Carrying through the cobwebs in my head, the cotton wool in my ears. Washing the film off my eyes. Invading our dreams, leaving us waking unfulfilled, nervous and shaking.
You laugh up your sleeve at our black jewelry, our obsession with detail. You don’t know why we do it. That’s fine. You don’t have to. We would never ask that of you.
It’s such a quiet invitation, so persistent.
Come away, come away with us…
They’ll never notice, you know that, we can make it so you were never gone. Or make it so that you never were, if you prefer. Just let us know, just answer us, just listen.
Just listen…
Every year, you send your children out into the night, never remembering that it is not the smiling pumpkins and candy overdoses you have to worry about. Never remembering how this ritual started. Where it came from. Forgetting who this night belongs to, what this season belongs to.
You can’t hear them.
Be grateful for that.
Be grateful we can.
And maybe explain to us, why we don’t just go out to the waters, and into the wilds…and join them.
When I grow up, I’ll be stable
Let me say this first: I am not a shop girl. I am, however, a girl who is temporarily working in a shop.
For Christmas this past year, Amras got me a practice amp and a cable. That was in January – it has been sitting under my loveseat collecting dust ever since. I have been absolutely terrified to plug in. This has been for a variety of reason – top in my head is that I know I’m not exactly a great player (er…one and a half songs does not a guitar player make) and I was genuinely nervous to hear what I actually sound like. Second in my mind was, if I could hear me, so could everyone else in the house.
17 years ago today, people got on planes, people went to work. They were businessmen, business women, pilots, firefighters, paramedics. It was just another morning. A random Tuesday in the middle of a year that had not been all that much different than any other.
One thing I’ve always had difficulty with is the concept that my hobbies are worth the time I want to give them. I want to practice, therefore somehow I end up not practicing because it feels like there should be better things that I’m doing with my time.
It rained our last call in Sitka, this nixed our original plan of paying a final visit to the national park (I don’t mind the park in the rain, but this really was a little too wet) – and set us to looking for indoor ways to pass the time instead. We had our final coffee and bagel at our favourite coffee shop, said goodbye to the handful of shopkeepers we’ve become acquainted with over the seasons and played our requisite games of pinball (I’m actually starting to win once in a while!) and then finally swung around to the Forget Me Not photo studio.
I’ve been doing this for nearly 9 years now, and yet I still never get used to the feeling of the last cruise of a contract. It always feels…so strange. You get used to things you see, you get used to your room, you get used to your friends, you get adjusted to being in the same ports on the same days, to waking up in different places every morning…
At long last, this afternoon Amras and I were finally able to get to the museum. We have actually been trying to do this all season, ever since it was announced that another large-scale travelling Egyptian exhibit was coming to town. I don’t know that we saved to the end of the contract on purpose, but that’s definitely how it worked out.
I think it is the purpose of computers to confound us. I really do. Sometimes, even though I work with them every day and rely on them to complete almost all of my day to day communication – I have no idea why we even invented the things. Make our lives easier? Ha! HA! I say!