Sharing

So, I’m riding in a taxi across Central Park South at 6:45, evening just fallen, the streets wonderfully full of people, horses, lights and leaves. And memories. Decades of memories, layers of memories. The most recent is a photo of JB, taken yesterday, by the subway entrance, for his CD. Before that, I was driving across town … on my way to another show at the Firebird, talking into my gizmo and making up a companion beside me, painting a picture in words.

Tonight I got out the gizmo and wrote into it: “Something about the way I want to share things … it can’t be done. I want the other person’s eyes to be inside my head. And then I want the person to have my soul. I want to go back and forth between being one and two. It really can’t be done. I write because I think that’s the closest you can get to that kind of sharing. There is, somehow, less stuff in the way. It’s a more direct contact with the heart. Or maybe just with MY heart.”

This is somehow a thing for me. I keep coming back to it in my life, in varying transformations. I take in some experience so very intensely, and I want to share it. Sometimes I don’t have a person in mind I want to share it with, but often I do, and in my mind’s eye I DO share it.

One of my constant examples is the walk across Lefferts Avenue on a sunny summer afternoon. Or at twilight. Or in the rain. Or in autumn. Or at night when the cats come out. There are roses and iris and forsythia, stinky ginkgo nuts and blazing leaves and cats of all sizes and colors, children and grandparents and avocadoes in the gutter and pennies on the sidewalk. Sunflowers with bees in them. Wild petunias wrapping me in their scent and their magenta. Cypress bending under the weight of ice, now sparkling in the new sun. Cypress dripping with the rain that passed, now sparkling in the new sun. I always run my hand through the raindrops and sometimes sip them.

And I dream of sharing it all, walking beside someone, giving away the sip of rain, wanting someone to see it, to experience it. Maybe a specific someone, maybe not. In my mind, I share it, and dream of a day when the sharing will be real.

And then … the day comes, and I’m walking down that real street with that real person and the rain is sparkling in the cypress … and I am so with the person that I never notice the rain.

And then other days come and I think I am alone somehow because I can never share in the way I dream of sharing. Because the stories I write in my head are more real than the reality. And the reality weaves itself into the stories. Because things happen the way I dream them but they are not as I dream. Because sometimes the space between me and those I care for seems so enormous, and sometimes the space doesn’t exist at all, there IS no distance.

And over my head I hear music in the air.

And it all seems so strange I wonder if I’m truly losing touch with reality. But when I’m musing on this it’s all so beautiful that I really don’t CARE if I’m losing touch. I’ll go ahead and burn like a shooting star, and then fall to earth like the rock that a shooting star really is, and it will all be fine.

And meanwhile Lefferts Avenue will be new every day and every day it will be familiar, and I will walk the route alone and in company and I will think of sharing and I will share and things won’t be what I thought but they will be beautiful in their own particular way if I will only pay attention.