All This Glorious Sunshine.

It’s been raining for days, off and on. Today it is cloudy, and the asphalt was wet this morning. The forecast calls for storms throughout the afternoon and night. I love the rain lashing the windows of my apartment. I sit at my piano and channel the rhythm of the tempest.

I keep telling my stories because I need to remember them. Time becomes a long bridge. The rift between what I was and who I am widens. Becomes nebulous. Menacing presences fade to smudges on pebbled lenses. Urgent pain subsides to low and vague aches; endurable unpleasantries.

When everything shattered, I felt like I was frantically grasping at impossibly edged shards. Desperately I tried to reassemble facades of what was, as blades of the past slit to ribbons the soft flesh of my hands trying to hold everything together. It was all too present. To immediate. I couldn’t see the picture for scrutinizing the details.

I had to let it all fall down. Crush glass to sand beneath my feet. Sweep it all away. Abandon all the glittering images I’d built to conceal the sickness of the core of a self that recoiled in horror from truth as a reflex. Crack the seal and let it all dissipate in wind and rain.

I’ve started building again. With bandaged hands I’ve taken up new tools and raised new edifices. Stronger ones. Plainer ones. Built on foundations of simple bedrock.

I will never be what I was. And I will never be what I might once have been. Those persons are lost to me by time and chance and unknowable potential. I am what I am now. I cannot be made perfect. Nothing can unmake the pain. But I have beautiful scars.

I have come blinking out of the dark. Look at all this glorious sunshine.