Stay

In this place I left some time ago

Where palm trees are imported from the tropics and planted in singular strokes. Side walks are paved for a linear route, and homes are lined up in rows of squares- the keep up is expensive-so make it pretty.

I’m now here to stay and this in its self is baffling. I look around for familiar faces but non-survived. They all had to assimilate in some form.

Phone calls and text link us from across the roads, states and countries where we reside. The conversations are not as deep for safety prevails and this means staying at the surface.

I use to love being the distant one. It made me feel that I made it out of the heavy -above the rim.

Always on the go, running before a hand could caress the reach of sorrow. I would check messages from afar. Sometimes on the train, others in a car, rarely on the bus but mainly at night-before I escaped into dreams.

I never knew the life of a settler. I moved from couches to apartments to cities and guest homes a like. Moving around was the only way I new how to not get trapped.

Now I’m the one still

And I’m scared

Last night during my solitary pillow talk I cried, where has everyone gone?

Now I yearn to be close and like a child I struggle to stay still. I am not sure how to be. I am not sure of what kind of linger will be instilled through the breath of another or their touch.

No one cares where I have been and the phone doesn’t ring like before.

It’s up to me to integrate travels of within and through out into stripes of wisdom gathered along my journey.

I have come home to what I left many years before-everyone starving to blend.

Awkward I grew up, quite they instilled, rebel walls I created as wild I walked.

I’m learning how to recognize myself because woman I have become. I have crossed the soul bridges and met many sages along the way. The past is a shadow I would often return to but now it’s a reminder of the unconditional love and courage I had to leave a web of deceit.

The running, the escape, the blurred lines is all I knew and now I am quite in the new. This is not to say that I am not wild, free- the whole version of the colorful me. Now I understand my colors and know how to paint. I am learning and practicing all the ways to remain not trapped within the politics of the land.

Breathing slowly, I take steps forward -where ever this may lead.