When She Leaves for New Adventures
By Z Zoccolante
I’m amazed how she clears out almost everything to leave on a new adventure, shedding physical things like water droplets, piles of clothes, candles. Each special object, wanting them to be taken, reused, and it reminds me of that things that holds inside of me, that part of me that makes a nest or a home or some storage vessel for my past or my present. Maybe taking a sense of supposed safety into my future unknown. The way my friend fills her fridge and cabinets to the brim with foods when it’s just her and how she says she feels as though she’s safe now, her body relaxes.
Maybe my safety is objects even though I don’t value fancy things, maybe it’s having them, the way birds gather sticks and weave them into a place to call home, being surrounded with the things they carried with care and woven together. This net of support to cradle me in the trees in the forest, in the wind.
All animals make a hive, a cave, and underground lair. We build boxes in the sky and furnish them with surrounding décor.
And yet she leaves her bed, her dresser, her lamp, her everything else there. She takes suitcases and items that fit in her car. She starts again. I’ve seen it before how she migrates like a bird taking her feathers, building new nests on different horizons.
Her medicine of pairing down, of shedding all the things that can be gotten again. Her idea of having things available, not owning them herself but having them available to use as though they are just provided from the ether. And I’m remembering how we drove an hour to get a duvet cover and pillow cases from someone on Craigslist, pastel colors and now it remains to be passed on again to another like sand passing through fingers.
Last night we had a fire pit and I sat on the couch watching her rip pages from her journal one by one and toss them into the flames. She doesn’t go back and read them she said. Meanwhile upstairs I have spiraled notebooks that are 15 years old. I’ve read some of them before and do sometimes return to them to remember a thing or two when memory wants validation. Thinking about burning them feels as though my past doesn’t exist, which makes no sense because right now it exists only in my mind as well. Maybe it just feels better having a place to put it, having pages trap my words between the lines, like etching history into stone. But there’s that thing again where I hold for no particular reason but something in me calls like that tree in the forest and if no one hears it fall did it really make a sound?
Her burning the pages, ripping them out one by one as the flames rise. She doesn’t hold things and there’s something powerful about that. I will miss how she’s been so committed to the community. Knowing she was manifesting with me has been a saving grace that has allowed me to flourish and grow because we only process things when we feel safe enough to do so.
She has been a tether, a barometer of growth because of constancy. Five years of living here, of how much I’ve grown and for all this incredible gratefulness that is flickers of pictures and images, and sounds and laughter etched in the walls. From the first night we got the TV’s internet connected and could finally watch shows, Christmas lights, popcorn, movies, and the little things that pass when all of us are living a life together.
And even now she rides in a golden orb, tires under a sky full of lights and stars to the next destination, the new adventure that awaits. The house is still filled with streamers that I’ll take down and vacuum underneath, cause that’s my chore, as the four of us left behind co-work in a room listening to flutes and the clicking of keyboards and breathing and occasional conversations and laughter.
I think my dog knows. Even though I have been preparing her she looks at me with worried eyes and wants to be closer than her usual lounging around. Her second human is on another adventure. And I wonder if it clicked when she said goodbye for now, her hands sliding up both her furry ears at the same time, tears in her eyes and her face slightly red. Her doggie tail padding the ground, watching the car take off as we held our hands to the sky in farewell.
And may the energy of dolphins bathe her gently on distant shores with love and grace and giggling laughter. Amen.
With Love,
Z :)
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