Autumn's sweet

(We call it fall…)

Remember that time,

When the world was upside down and inside out?

It always was, in those days.

There were no good ways 

to tell if true north even existed,

Let alone in which direction one might find it.

My north star was in the southern hemisphere,

And my home was not where my heart was.

I was addicted to the buzz of new friends, new possibilities.

10 years today, since the sun set on that life;

Its flame extinguished.
I wouldn't trade this security and fulfillment for all of that dazzle
but
I wouldn't mind recapturing a firm hold on the badass I once was,
or imagined myself to be...

****

I was listening to Bob Dylan today,
and it reminded me of that time,
you know the one.
That night, in the deepest reaches of Utah's winter,
(during the strange, hollow intermission between marriages)
when Blaine showed up on my darkened porch
(how late was it?)
with a guitar and a fidgeting need to be calmed by Dylan.
I never did turn on the lights,
but he played "Tangled up in Blue" in my living room,
and I almost sobbed at the way
my life was so tangled up,
even though freedom really was as sweet as I'd dreamed...
it just all felt so strange still,
to not live in fear, to not feel trapped;
but he was there,
my not-quite-boyfriend,
being so very...Blaine...
so very mystical and impish,
almost dangerous, but just out of reach;
he stopped singing abruptly and laughed.
Did I ever tell you about the time
Bobby McGee stole my shirt?
I felt trapped in my own daydream,
silently surrounded by visions of Janis
and all the stories that song had inspired in me...
and here was this imaginary man, made real, singing and laughing,
and I fell into the bubble of his memories;
he told me about one time when he was still living in Santa Cruz,
and he was crashing at some musican's house,
and the man who'd inspired the song took a shirt from his closet;
and we stumbled up the stairs and into the bed that

the bed that...it jars me to think of now,
to try to contextualize the journey of that piece of furniture--
It was a bridge from one chapter of my life to the next,
and it is with me still (the guest bed now, but, here).
And it just seems so strange...

Blaine spent that winter sailing across the slopes on the back side of Mt. Timpanogos,
the gorgeous peaks shrugging up from the perfect little valley of Robert Redford's empire.
As winter wound down, and I was ready to move on,
he was hungry to commit.
Sorry, dude, you never really belonged in my world anyway.