Stay close to me. Stay close.

Yesterday, as I walked up the street, a small brown bird, a sparrow I think, was bobbing on the branch of a forsythia bush. The bush had only a handful of bright yellow flowers in the tangle of its thin brown branches. How did it hold that tiny bird’s plump body? Did it feel him? I was stopped, under a clouded over sky, and just taken with this life and that – the scant flowers, the bubbling bird perfection.

Hope.

It’s that simple. Puzzles and patterns and complicated stories, being forlorn and forgotten, a maze of twisted paths in the mind, leading me into a tangle away from you.

How did you know that I love the bird bodies, their little miracles, so common – they are everywhere.

How do I ever doubt you?

I didn’t stop forever, I continued up the street into the next moment and the next, the bubble of hope floating in my heart – this way is up.

I walked through the farmer’s market, stopping to buy honey. The woman ahead of me bought soap and a bottle of dark buckwheat honey, “Dense sweet, savory in its last notes,” the farmer said. When it was my turn I chose the creamed honey, thick and spun into a light yellow haze.

It was late afternoon. The stalls were emptying, trucks packing up. The lavender stall still casting its scent into the air as I walked past.

How little it does take to return me home, the home of you. Why would I not believe it to be so? Could life really be so alive? This feeling, it makes me want to give, to give everything.

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