keeping busy

She's keeping busy. I don't see the point, so I sit in this little room off the back porch (where the gardener used to sleep, when we still had one), gazing out the window and daydreaming. Not long ago I was just like her, scurrying around, trying to stock up, frantic to get everything finished before we had to lock the gate. Well, now that worry is over: nothing to be done any more. About anything.

She can't stand that kind of thinking: to her it's giving up, something she never could do, once she's made up her mind. I admire that in her: I dither constantly, or did, when it seemed there was a chance, something to do to make things better, if only to stave off the inevitable. But she doesn't believe in the inevitable. Maybe she knows she's wrong about that, but what she doesn't see the point of is just caving in to it, surrendering. Maybe this difference balances us off somehow, I don't know.

She's only being herself, I keep telling myself. I'm no different in this respect — not that I'm a pessimist, far from it: if anything I'm the romantic in this duo, there's always hope — except... no there isn't. Not any more. Might as well face it, take a break at last, ease up on myself. And everyone else.

Not she. She could never stand to stand still — she told me right away: as soon as it became even a faint possibility that we would end up together, she provided me with a list of all the things about her that might drive me crazy, many of which do, it turns out. Can't say I wasn't warned.

But actually, I really don't care. Neither of us is going to change — there's been plenty of chance for that, and it just didn't happen, so now here we are. Stuck in the kind of situation no one ever thought —...

On the other hand, there's nothing like this kind of situation to kill off my fretMachine spinning & spinning inside, the kind that makes a person worry and fuss over all kinds of trivial things that don't matter a damn. Well, there's never been this kind of situation, either, at least not around here, in my life or hers. So I figure I may as well just be myself as much as I can, but also give her all the room she wants to be herself as well.

Can't hurt. Well, yes it can — I'm just saying there's really nothing else to do, except to poison everything she does or wants to, and that's even more pointless than doing nothing.

Not that it matters a damn what I do or what she does. About anything.

The pale gray light on the mountain opposite is just warming now, and the birds have calmed down, as they do once the sun's fully up, to the occasional lazy warble or tweet. Half an hour ago their noise was nearly deafening: roosters, crows, robins, sparrows, wrens, catbirds, doves — all of them (maybe even the roosters, but who knows what they're yelling about all day long and half the night) calling to their mates, pleading, urgent, 'Honey, please, please! It's springtime, we got work to do, we need to get busy, you and me, we need to do it NOW.'

That's fine for them. Whatever is about to happen to us, they'll go on just as if we never showed up to wreck their nests and mess up their little lives — which of course aren't little at all, they're life-sized, just like ours are to us. Maybe there are beings we can't even imagine looking down in pity on our little lives, thinking of us as poor tiny things that just ended up in the road of whatever it is that sweeps things away now and then. Or whatever it is that's going to happen, that is happening right now, though we may not see it or hear it or feel it yet. But we will. And we know it; have known it all along but didn't think it was going to get all the way to us, somehow, or not before we could make our getaway. But that's the thing about being wrong: it looks just like being right, until you learn your mistake.

I think I'll let my sweetie sleep a little longer. Then when she gets up, I'll do whatever she thinks up for me to do with gratitude and an open heart. I know she's just trying to keep us busy, and I want her happy.