"...this is not how I want to be forgotten. This is not how I want to leave remains..."

It is

tonight. Thinking about how I wish sometime this page was like the first page of the books I used to read when I was small. The first letter consuming half of a page. Taking up the ink and paper like it was someone’s idea of a grand entrance.

It is

how I write these things out. One at a time. Hearing the voices of all the people, old and young, I see on a day in and day out basis. Of hearing my four-year-old charge’s (oh-my-Michael) voice from the backseat the other day, ripping through a slightly chaotic and admittedly anxietal thought stream: “Kelly,” he said. “The dream of moving is not as good as actually moving.”

So he says. I can’t help but thinking he might be right.

It is

running my hands along the walls in these places, these times, that are starting to seem fleeting in the grander scheme. If you make this decision and it inevitably leads to the conclusion of either points A-1,000,000—how do you ever decide? And so the fear of failure is becoming a much welcomed, but often disdained friend of old.

His footsteps, or footfalls—so well marked and memorized—should be ignored.

It is

the fact that, as I write these things, I know they sound like riddles and, to some extent, they must be. I have nothing to say for myself. Besides the fact that I’m learning it all too, as I go along. They told me, once, that [I] could literally do anything. They just never mentioned that getting to ‘anything’ could be littered with the pitfalls and fitfalls of what we call life.

What do you risk in terms of what could be a greater reward? How far out do you go before the water is too deep and you turn back, or drop the anchor, or just throw yourself overboard?

It is

secrets that you give away on a day to day basis. Like the eight-year-old who is also in my charge (for-my-Gracie), asking me, begging me to show her what I look like without make-up on. I put my head slowly under the water before resurfacing to answer, “Much like this.”

“Funny,” she answered. “I don’t see that much of a difference.”

So, why take the extra time… honestly… to hide?

As these days go out and I’m awaiting this news or that that could change the rest of these next years in a way I didn’t hardly suspect (Do you sail to far off places and drop an anchor in more ancient lands? ), I wonder at the possibility of all the things to come and what changes when you actually make a change and what will stay the same. And more bluntly and less poetically, all the new ways I might be able fail.

Or, do you

do as Matt Pond suggests and say, “I give the finger to my fate. He doesn’t know me and he cannot see that far…”?

Advice: get this. It’ll do you good.