letting life in

I'm flying solo for the next 5 days. I will miss him, as I always do when he is not here. I need him like a plant needs the sun, like turkey needs gravy. It's not all bad, though. I plan on spending some time alone, something that I am less motivated to do when he is in close range. I find quiet comfortable. I listen for the sounds of life around me - a neighbour's laughter, hesitant strains of violin music, a dog eager to be walked - and smile to myself in my warm, sweet-smelling space with the golden wood and bare walls. This is precious to me, this pseudo-silence.

He often wonders what is happening in my head, what I'm thinking when I'm smiling slightly and sitting quietly while the world whirls around me. There are times when I am consumed with what transpires in my immediate sphere because it is impossible to not be willingly enveloped in the shouted laughter, the erudite ribaldry. So many good things happen there. I learn, I laugh, I get judo-tossed (sometimes) to the floor. Love is lavished upon my nose, legs are entwined on couches and heads are pillowed on shoulders.

Then there is me, outside it all. The me who wandered off as a little girl to sit in the woods in a sheltered spot near water, sometimes with a book but often with nothing but her thoughts to occupy her time alone. My mother would always smile upon my eventual return, knowing what I had been up to. I don't have a secret garden now, but I take similar refuge in a patch of sunlight on a square of floor stained the colour of honey,the dust motes that dance in front of multipaned windows. The grainy texture of a plaster wall, crowned with moldings thick with years of paint pleases me, satisfies me in a way that is visceral. I love the details, the essence of that which makes something itself, or more than itself.

So I'm letting life in over the next 5 days. I'm going to take the time to count the motes, trace their lazy choreography through air undisturbed by the comings and goings of others. I will take my grandmother's violin out of its case and remember her fingers on the strings, her merry bow arm. I will sip soup out of an oversized mug and bump heads with the kitten that will be welcomed into my home as of this evening. Maybe I'll write it all down, maybe I won't. Maybe I'll just smile.