Things that matter most.

There are minutes that are divided by what feels like hours and there are days in life that seem to pass in the space of a heartbeat. I've realized that if I were to make a list of things that I hold close to me these days it wouldn't contain a thing that I actually own. No object in my life is so important that it cannot be replaced by something else it seems. What I find myself clutching to when I get weak are things that I cannot hold onto. Memories that made sense. Words that left imprints. Moments that shaped my soul so strongly I woke up the next morning knowing the very fingerprint of who I was had changed. When I sort back through these things it feels almost like blinking in and out of scenes from movies I used to know by heart but had fallen away from and forgotten. Falling from a rope swing and hearing my father's feet scramble on a gravel road toward me. Standing on the edge of an overlook in a Tennessee valley and wondering how long it took a rock to hit the ground. Laying in an old tire as it floated down a river in West Virginia and watching the dragonflies buzz above me. Clear sunny skies with just enough clouds. My best friend and I falling asleep in her twin sized bed that we shared with two dogs. That one night in Baltimore I drank far too much and felt like the music around me was a part of my body, my heartbeat lining up in time to the bass. Long mornings in coffee shops rolling cigarettes and playing chess, reading the paper and sitting across from someone and spending time together yet totally apart while the world buzzed around. Getting lost in the woods behind my town house, stumbling on a field full of yellow flowers and then never being able to find it again. I remember hands on my wrists. Fingertips sliding down my back and lips pressed to my forehead as I fell asleep. Screaming the words to my favorite songs in crowds of tens and tens of thousands. My feet on the dashboard while a station wagon flies down back country roads and the feeling of being somewhere between asleep and awake with just my fingertips touching the hand of the person lying next to me. Moments of such startling clarity  that they still feel real, true and echoing into the deepest parts of myself and breathing new life into me when I worry that my time for those moments is passed. The images and colors and shapes all seem to blur together until they become some kind of vast, unnamed universe that I hold inside my heart and bring with me wherever I go and take with me whenever I leave. It it breathtaking, and I'm not sure that this stab at vocalization can do justice to the way I know and feel these things, but for me they are real and they are true and they are important. And they are mine.