Turtles Dreaming

Naguib Mahfouz writes "Home is not where you were born. Home is where all your attempts to escape cease." I forget this.

*

Chrisoula and I drive to Worthington. The point is to talk about X outside the house, away from others, but we never talk about X when we're alone. X is not the problem, X is what hides the problem. We walk from the center of town to the fire pond in the woods where growing up I smashed beaver traps and decades later sat for hours on the grassy bank with Jake watching butterflies and turtles, dreaming I was Christ, playing with words, hiding from the world. 

We talk about healing, how supporting others in their healing can easily become a way of avoiding our own. It's an old story; this is old ground.

A golden eagle glides north over the soft ice, the green pines.

I don't want the past anymore. And Chrisoula never did.

I love this life, I don't care who knows it. I don't want to die. I'm tired of pretending I know anything about non-being. I miss my dogs. 

I miss my woman. 

Walking back my throat hurts. Why did so much in this life have to be so hard. Chrisoula is scared I'm not okay, might backslide into self-harm, I'm scared she can't actually forgive me. I tell her in Spring we will come back and see bears. What I really mean is, tell me there will be a Spring.

She doesn't answer but it's okay. I asked for one more winter, was given one, this one. Nothing real can be threatened, nothing unreal exists. Our shoulders graze leaving the forest. Once upon a time she lit up the interior brighter than Dōgen, brighter than Tara Singh. Now the lamp is shared and its little glow reaches barely past our fingers. 

*

Driving home the long way, something else Mahfouz said, I don't remember exactly, but it had to do with the heart and its secrets. I don't remember the context; I don't know if it fits here. It feels like it does. But I don't know.