Night Time Thinking

Tonight, in the late hours, I find myself searching.  Searching for a spark, for something to stoke a waning flame within me.  A flame that I fear my heart is losing, a flame that would keep me from growing cold.  Not an evil cold, not a loveless cold, but rather a cold that spins the hands of the clock just a little faster with each passing day.  A cold that hides from me the feelings of the moment, a greying cold.

I know where this spark hides.  It is not lost.  It lives in the moments I've been moving too fast to perceive.  It's in the cracked and faded old paint chips hanging from the door my great grandfather hung decades ago.  It's in the blades of grass, new and old, that I absently yank a hose and sprinkler over.  This spark can be found in our cat's meow as I tell it to 'shut the fuck up,' and the look of not caring it gives me as it plods away.  There is something I need to be absorbing, filing within myself, from the dozens of identical phone messages my dying grandfather leaves on the answering machine throughout the week.

"Hello, just calling to check in, I'll talk at you later," he always says.

Knowing his worsening mental and physical condition, I realize that I should be more involved with his end-life.  The cold in me doesn't hold this notion.  It is over end-life, been there done that.  People, even family members (especially family members), will die.  It sucks while it is happening but then it ends and things go back to an emptier normal.  At least until the next time...

This is the cold talking.  The cold that will make me upset at stacks of envelopes or a cluttered sink.  Stupid things that threaten to invade my sense of daily import.

I am not this cold person, I never have been nor do I intend to be.

That is why I must find and add fuel to the spark.  Why I must slow down.

Look more people in the eye, try to end phone conversations less quickly, take more pictures, look at more pictures, read a god-damn book, shake up the routine, start being where I am, not where I'm going, listen to whole albums and not the same song over and over, read the classifieds, read the obituaries, get more out of my exercise routine than droning out 30 pushups 30 pull-ups and 30 abdominal crunches, stop rounding everything to 30, mail a postcard to my grandmother, paint that old door, or maybe, just maybe, I need to get down on my hands and knees and just start meowing back at the cat.