Bubbles

It is a normal, predictable Thursday. The same plots are being re-enacted on the television; the cat is napping in the same posture as yesterday; the same kids rocket by the window on various wheels; the mail carrier greets me in the same way; my back hurts in the same place; and the same star shines first in the west.

But something IS different today: I have, in my hand, the final copy of my first book of poetry.
It has been a long Odyssey, and even though I have been expecting the shipment, nothing comes near the actual feeling of holding the copy in my hands.

I am not ecstatic and I don't expect my life to change in any way. This is not some kind of pinnacle or a point of no return. This is one of the clogs ticking and clanging in place, a recognition. There is a comfort when a part of the self gets affirmed, like when one confirms a part of how the world works. For instance, I'd never seen an entire row of blue jelly fish being washed on the sand like I did last weekend. But the sight reaffirmed what I should have known: of course, that's what it's supposed to look like!

We watched the jellyfish rolling in with the waves, trailing their laces behind them, quivering as they burrowed deeper in the sand, the ink swilling like a little ocean contained in a balloon. A little unsuspecting bubble is all that can be seen once they are settled. One would have to consider one's next step very carefully.

Today my joy feels like the bubble scattered on a sandy shore, one among many, constantly being worked on by the motions of the waves, sand, the busy rocking of the very earth as the cosmos scuttles around in the important business of living. I send my feelers out towards the horizon, the line that defines our very realities but doesn't need to exist. I try to catch a wave that has passed over me: a time when I first realised that holding my book would be a part of who I wanted to be.

I dedicate this entry to that moment when I lay on that swing in a house called Horizon, watched the clouds swilling across the sky, and as the swing swept the winds over the pages of the book on my lap, I wished and vowed that one day, I'd hold a book of my own in my hands.

The house called Horizon, along with its swing, is gone and cannot return.

So I stand at the edge of the ocean, my book in my hand, and fling my image onto the horizon, to reach that house, that swing, that girl, that sky.