My head hurts, up this high. Its only 6200 feet tonight and I'm
headed further up tomorrow, but still, its dry, its high, my skin feels tight
around my face, my voice is cracking and my head hurts. But Colorado calls
every August and I come here beckoned. A yearly pilgrimage. Today I was
thinking about a few years back, same time, a random meeting, or re-meeting,
rather, of an old friend. Someone who'd disappeared and then showed up, leaning
against a wall, a smirkish smile, arms crossed, looking still like a kid, but
older, greyer, more life and more lines in his eyes. Beautiful, tired and
unsure. And I was thinking of this old friend's fearlessness back then, perhaps
foolishness, perhaps blindness, but call it what I will, whatever it was, his
audacity was exciting and tempting and impossible and as crazy as Frank
carrying the cross from Maine to Mexico. I leaned into it for a few days, a
little while, then shook it off like a deja vu. He's gone again,
disappeared into another crack in the mountains I think, running a river or
running a hill or maybe he stopped running things and maybe he's eating dinner
with someone he loves, a life he ran after. I started this blog not
knowing what I was going to write about, but the fingers felt itchy to type, up
here in the thin air. But I knew what I was thinking of and it wasn't this lost
friend. It was something else, but now that this memory has elbowed its way in
front of the other I can almost see why. He's a haunting, wisping through the
movie running currently in my head. I am being oblique here. Running around my
own foolishness and audacity, blind and wonderful. I wonder if the boy
who leaned will come back in 10 years, just to lean in the back corner of a
theater I'm playing, with a boy next to him. I wonder if there's a reason for
people to show up unsuspecting in our lives, to tempt or lead or illuminate.
I'm not a woman of faith or fate. I'm a woman of concrete evidence. But
lean against a door that falls open and how are you not supposed to walk
through, curious. Of course, Pandora probably asked the same question and see
where it led her.
This could all be a dizzying lightheaded dream. Or that could
have been.
Sarah Carter was in Mexico, working at a radio station, and sang
a song that was heard in northern California. Someone came running who heard
it. Years later.
I have no intention of singing that song or looking to go
backwards. I wrote of loneliness lately and there's an antithesis here between
the thin air of memory and the heaviness of lonely. I'm just curious about the
last page of the story.
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