Hot Day

I lay on the albino memory of a lawn as a wind from a foreign desert I’ve never seen cracks my lips and flings sharp sand into my eyes. My smile is blown from my face, flying out over the valley, dancing to the rhythm of finger-snapping flags. My body moves to a different song. The inner me straining to fly, sings the high notes as my body thumps out the bass line of my feet dragging my body along in my daily routine. I am nervous, afraid of lagging behind the beat, losing the rhythm as it dances on, or of singing a false note in the harmony I am trying to make of my life.

I roll over and breathe deeply, drawing in the yellow straw smell, mixing it with the deep earth in the crucible of my lungs,. I have pushed and prodded, run around, run towards, run away, run down, lost and found, meant and missed, and finally in this eternal moment of ‘where am I now’, I ask myself, is that really what brought me here, rolling around in the dust like the half-mad neighbor to be politely ignored?

I hear a whisper from the withered grass. It tries not to laugh but I hear it nonetheless. I have always been here, since now is always and a dot is a world only partially explored. I am not waiting, I am being.  A half-buried boulder tells me of its journey, panting between breaths, running at breakneck speed, racing to keep up with the centuries in their race against time.

I roll onto my back, grasping at handfuls of dry grass to keep from falling off the world, dizzy from the effort as I stare down into the depths of the sky above. Can I feel the mountain swell beneath me as the waves of rock fold over the land? Where am I in this eternal moment of reality? Creation and destruction are two heartbeats  in the body of god. And yet here I stand, clapping the dust from my palms, feeling my hands brush twigs from my clothes. I tell myself that the jittery feeling in my knees is the extra cup of coffee I drank this morning. I close my eyes, to just one more moment of strangeness in an already peculiar day. I strain to listen. One note, one instrument in an orchestra as large as the world, playing a song as long as time.