Canto Alla Vita

We are chameleons, and our partialities and prejudices change places with an easy and blessed facility, and we are soon wonted to the change and happy in it. We do not regret our old, yellow fangs and tushes after we have worn nice fresh uniform store teeth a while. ~Samuel Clements

Sometimes you can look forward to a moment so much that you play it out in your mind a million times what you would say, how you would move, look, feel, see. It has been so much a part of you that you know it by heart or just want to. I had done this thinking of how it might go when I next saw him. I was walking the high bank of the stream intending to wet the leather I'd been working on when I saw him sitting on an overhang above the edge. For a moment I wondered if he heard the race of my pulse as part of the roar that surrounds him.

He makes me smile. I can't help it. No matter how many times I had gone over this moment, it all just faded away when I put the bucket down and just went to him. It wouldn't be until I thought back to replay it all over and over again that I would even realize that blue was there. I knew it but I didn't know it. He was all that mattered.

We were doing that 'After you My dear Alfonse' scenario in a way while he seemed to relax a little. He asked why I'd come and I showed him the braided pieces of the halter and bit. I love his questions most of the time, they drive me crazy just as easily. I almost chuckled when he began the endless barrage of them. The explanation that the tack wasn't for Cana as he first thought but mine from a wager provoked him to ask what I was going to do with them. The plans for bringing them back to usefulness and learning how they worked seemed logically understandable though the more profound reason I simply offered quietly. In time I wanted to learn how not to need them.

Can't lie to you, nope, I took time to just look at him, to drink him in. He has changed in many ways as well. He looks healthier, not so much like the lanky youth I first met. Still so few consider how young he is and I could see the man emerging more fully in his physique, in his mannerisms. Life has been good to him since I left and that created a guilty twinge inside. It was not the only way he affected me and let me assure you he does. I doubt there are many women among the harigga that could say he doesn't make something inside them go pitty pat ... somewhere.

I didn't think that my nervousness was visible until he said we both seemed like we were sitting on needles. That was when I left everything I had thought of saying behind and just began talking to him. It's been so long since we've talked, he seems like a stranger. Perhaps it is because we never took the time to actually get to know one another much before I'd returned to being a camp slave. I can't remember just sitting and talking to him as we did that morning. So many times I felt that selfishly screaming voice inside saying ... hear me, see me that I just hushed it now and relished that for this moment, for right now ... he did. It was nothing at all like I imagined.

For all of the queries he posed and the probing within me, I could hear all he didn't say. There was no anger, there was no defensive frustrations, just a calm quiet, now and then a chuckle of his own and ohh his smile. How very different than some of the times we have spent together. I've never known anyone that made life feel so intense as he does. I enjoy being close to him, it is my favorite place to be. As long as it isn't too close? Should I have shouted to the skies at the top of my lungs that I could crawl inside him and hold on so tight that nothing could drag me out without one helluva fight? I wanted to be far closer than ever before was all that tumbled out. What had changed that I wanted to be there now when it seemed as if I didn't before? It didn't seem like the time to go back to the beginning and dump out a whole bucket of squiggly emotions about larls and dreams and things I didn't have any understanding of to be truthful. The bottom line was that all the reasons I'd left were simply mundane, too mundane to even mention. Part is that the plains, the Tuchuk, this way of living isn't so new and foreign to me now. Part is that I have made mistakes and have learned from them.

Each new question seeped with pain but this time I refused to withdraw. I refused to do more than be right there next to him, to talk with him, to answer them honestly, openly regardless of how raw some of them felt. I'd never thought I held anything back from him but that exposure proved just how much I had. I didn't realize I'd had such trouble letting him see so many of my frailties. He thought I had trouble seeing his. His? Oh sweet plains, he didn't know that all I saw was a man I cared for deeper than I had ever cared for anyone or anything in my life. No, how would he know? How could he?

If there was nothing else that came of those few moments of being able to talk with him, I wanted, needed him to know that I have never regretted caring for him. He was never a mistake. No tumbling over the wall, no sailing over it and knocking it down, just lifting one stone off another. One that should not have been there.

All the rhetoric about how I take him with me everywhere I go, in everything I do, that in my heart I am still his, seemed so little to offer in the end. It would have sounded empty and shallow to me if someone had been telling me these things without showing me. He stands on his decision that I have chosen my destiny. Didn't he ever feel strongly enough about something to stand and say .. 'I do not agree'? Maybe I should have told him that ... I had. Instead I found myself agreeing that it does little good. Even though I don't care for the words ... destiny ... fate, he does. I respect that he feels very deeply about them.

I had heard once that the greatest strains on relationships can be categorized ... family, money, sex or religion, in my case childish stupidity should be tagged on the end of that as well. No matter what had separated us in the beginning, we have differing opinions about something very important, as close to religion as you can get being Tuchuk. It may be semantics, maybe I only want it to be so simple. I want to know what destiny means to him. I want to understand. I'd like to hear his feelings, his thoughts and not just because I have a vested interest.

When he slipped from this world to walk the realm of dreams, I wanted so badly to simply go with him, to throw off the reins and bit that held me back and just reach ... reach through the mists and grasp his hand, I whispered to him.

Walking away from that little hilltop, I wasn't breathlessly trembling with excitement. The smile played gently along the edges of my mouth belied a heart filled achingly full and a head that had an altogether new tumble of thoughts, questions and a quest for Amor Fati.