Somewhere

Someone doesn’t sit alone in the dark wondering
Someone hears a baby cry
Someone sees the rainfall
Someone sees the sun shine brightly

Somewhere
Someone isn’t worried
Someone is calm
Someone is smiling
Someone watches over another

Somewhere
Someone is dying
Someone is being born
And Someone is just existing

She sits and stares at the computer, watching carefully the flashing cursor and reflects for a moment how fragile life is and how quickly it all changes. She ponders the choices she’s made for seemingly the right reasons but now questions those very choices that have led her here to this place in time. “Does any of it matter?” she asks in darkness of the night to no one there. The very sound of her voice cutting through the silence startles her as her head snaps up and her body shakes. She looks around as the images of the past play before her, and the familiar shapes dissipate into an ethereal cloud. As the room shifts and her mind clears herself of the fog, she realizes she’s been staring into a roaring fireplace, and became lost in flame’s sacred dance. A friend had come by and sat beside her, began to prattle on about some nonsense; but she didn’t move or shift her eyes from the flame, for she was lost in a world that she doesn’t understand. In a flash, she blinked, and everything again shifted. She was back in the here and now, but sadness crept in, enclosing long fingers around her throat rendering her silent again, but only for a moment. Suddenly she jumped a little, sat up straight, and smiled at her friend saying, “I understand.”

“I understand” is a phrase she uses often when she doesn’t know what else to say, and sometimes will say when she’s not paying attention, like now. Her friend smiled, picked up her drink and walked way, hopefully feeling validated that someone else understood her. She tried not to resume staring into the hypnotic flicker of the now dying fire, and tried to ignore the hot burning embers that made her feel so warm inside. She looked about the room, and out the window, seeing the rain fall over the trees, the gray sky giving up it’s fight of daylight, almost succumbing to the darkness that will follow.

She rises slowly and fluidly off the sofa, finding her way quickly to his side and tugs gently on his coat, she smiles up at him, as she whispers, “it’s time to go.”

© 2006