{by Amy Turn Sharp from doobleh-vay}

This year is different. Each year as we turn around the sun and land smack into a new holiday everything is really relative to the places we have just come from.
My husband lost his father this summer.
Thick in the summer morning heat at the end of July I got a phone call quiet from England.
Joe’s sweet sister shaky with tears told me that dad had died.
I wrote about telling Joe this news:

You never write the narrative of yr own sadness until the moment it happens.

Joe’s father died last night.

It’s like there is a giant hole in England now
in his town
in Joe’s heart

And when I had to put my arms around him
to hold him and tell him
it was like he wasn’t all there
like he had shrunk to the size of a boy
and even my strong strong arms
wrapped right around him
couldn’t do enough

It has marked me. Like tracks we all have across our souls from the biggest imprints of our lives.
From horrible events to the most exquisite blissful times we have ever known and not the little in between.
The big things that freeze a life and spin it.

{Originally Published on Doobleh-Vay}

I dream of riding the Orient Express

for two nights in a row now

I am in a bright cabin with paper and pencils

and very Bohemian in an authentic way

like the way I used to wrap scarves around my head in college

and head out to the bar for a drink

when it was not even chic- just odd

scarves that my Kurdish friend would give me

and how they were so bright turquoise

that I stood out from miles away

like a beacon to other strange girls

blinking and calling out

be the person yr supposed to be

and later you will be fine with it

I am on a journey and at some point in the dream I freeze frame for a second and hit some sort of intense epiphany- only I wake up right as I feel the hairs on my body stand and stir

it was like that yesterday too