And Where It Will End

A Lori Tale

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I received a beautiful letter today. It was amazing. Do you know what I mean? So unique, so beautiful. In its entirety, the letter read: I Love You.

I read it over several times. How many people ever loved someone they had never met?

The phone rang.

“Yes.”

“Harry, it’s Steve.”

“Not now, Steve. I’m writing.”

“Did you read the damn contract, Harry?”

“Steve, I can’t deal with this right now.

“Hell, Harry, this is a mess. Tell me what you want to do.”

Tear it up, eat it. Don’t come at me with this thing right now. You’ve blocked my thought process.

And that was how the call ended. I wanted to sit quietly. Write my heart out to you, a heart that has often found itself folded and put away or tucked into a shoebox out of sight. You’re so real in an ugly world. I’m not afraid.

I have these momentary lapses of concentration. Sometimes, it as insignificant as a phone call. Once caused by the sight of a whale passing.

“Mr. Harry, are you there?”

“Lori?”

“I’m so tired. I’m so open with you, Mr. Harry. Why do you live with so many secrets?”

It’s true. I go my own way in the world, making the changes I need. Not to be under someone else’s scrutiny. My own life is hard enough. It is the glad price I pay to live outside the whirling world.

“Lori, it’s cold on these Scottish shores. Here, let me put my jacket around you.”

Children, when they get colds, I worry. When they are gone too long, I worry. When they forget how much they are loved, I worry. We are what our parents make of us come the evening. For a long time, we are dependent, then self-sufficient. We make the mistakes they warmed us about until one day parents become children again. We worry for them the way they feared for us.

Lori might be an illusion, some clever trickery to make me feel I’m understood. I want to send my love out to the world. I want to let the world see how beautiful, strange, and deep it is. I have no other way of explaining my life right now. That is so odd.

“It’s okay, Mr. Harry. Secrets are just that. It is cold. It makes me think about the summer and long for it to come. The winter, too, holds secrets.”

I wish I could gather up all the summers that have forgotten my shadow. I would fill a bag and bring them down to the shore, retracing my footsteps in the sand to what was my time. But I’m living the sunset colors; evenings only lengthen the shadows of who I once was. Remembering all those times when no shadow was visible. Lately, I sleep late. Seldom seen in the scarlet mornings. These days I depend on sunsets more than I do sunrises, even when no sunset comes.

I fill my head with sunshine past, walk with my memories through the shadow of a once togetherness. Where are the times I raced up sand-dunes? When time went hurrying down the shoreline, flying through windswept skies — to come down, where? I seem to have run through my life so fast I missed the things worth stopping for.

I never gave thought to where I was going or with whom. I was running. That’s all. Things change, shadows stay. Memories never get so old they cannot dart down cliffs like butterflies. Or grow like marigolds, or dazzle like dandelions. Hurry up, then, hold my hand. We’ve still so much to do.

“Can you run with me, Mr. Harry?”

“Of course, Lori. As far as these old legs will carry me. Catch me!”

Finally, exhaustion allows Lori to rest in sleep. To hold a child is to hold innocence. To watch her sleeping is to watch a world without pain. Peace is found in a child’s face.

The new world order has become a world of extremes. We are touched by its cruelty, its unfairness, its regret. It is an environment that grows power, not love.

I look at the open letter in my hand and read the words. That is where my day began…where it will end.

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