The Bits Cut Loose

The hug I gave to Ann last week, for instance: could I conceivably say that it is not part of me? And can I say it's dead, because it happened in the past? Of course it's not dead, while I remember it and while Ann remembers it. But more than that. It's not dead because it's colored everything we both have done in the week since. It spreads like a tint in water. Impossible to kill, impossible to isolate. And yet if anything is me, it is that warm and lovely hug, after a massage, in the Sunday dusk. I have been leaving bits of me behind all my life: and by now the bits that have lost all contact with my body and my present stream of consciousness are far, far bigger and more important than any bits that are still to come. Why should I mind about dying, about this particular lump of tissue becoming inert? It has never had much importance, even just in relation to the other bits of me cut loose and swimming in the universe, and each day I get closer to my death it has proportionally less. This part of me, though it carries the brand-name and logo -- Dale Favier in the Flesh! -- is not the most important part of me. It's not a very important part of me at all, actually.

Quiet gray dawn. Out my window I see the leafless, tangled, silvery twigs of the neighbor's dogwood tree, and its darker, mossy branches. Their lines arrange themselves in concentric circles for my eye. And behind, the the dark green of the doug firs boughs, wavering. Just barely, at the range of my hearing, birds peeping. Or am I imagining it? I can't tell.

Loving you this morning intensely, missing your bright eyes, missing your laughter. Last night the waxing moon rode in a surf of wispy clouds, running fast before the wind. I thought of the warmth of your chest, of how I love to listen to your heartbeat.

The light has grown while I write. Almost the plain light of day now. I love you. Take such good care today. And tonight, God willing, I will hold you, in one of your incarnations. And we will send more bits of ourselves out on the water.