“In a dream, I’m holding you close and when I wake, I do. How lucky, to want and have.”

How radiant you are, waiting by the window, watching for the sun to grant you more time to dance beneath it. You’ve let yourself dream again. Even if its in bites, even if it’s in a different voice than it used to be.

I descend into an unopened sky, the ocean floor, the final embrace of a graveyard. Find your fill of me before my blue pales like a sour moon.

In a dream, my fingertips pulse. I’ll be patient in my blooming. In a dream, I let time pass through open hands.

I still know the fabric of where I begin and end.

I allow myself to be a weathervane; receive every feeling that greets the shore of me.

I’m writing about moving again, and when I write about moving, I really mean beginning. I’m beginning again.

Take me back to the evergreen trees; to the sunlight through the leaves, the bending ferns and fronds. The pitter of the rain, the smooth rocks sleeping under moss. Take me back to the life I know before this body.

I want to wade into the water on the sidewalk, crawl out of this feeling without giving it a name. Take a lighter to love’s sticky edges so its sadness isn’t caught in my throat.

We’ve never seen what a happy life could look like if we chose to spend it by ourselves – sharing our beautiful lives with friends, family members, the occasional crush, and lounging out in that quiet space alone as if an idyllic sunned beach.

Hold me here, where I feel less like a stranger to my own laughter. Where it’s easier to believe things happen for a reason or maybe, at least, out of a thousand winding roads my life might take, I will still find one that fits me.

People have been washed away by less. I’ll take every step gently. So often, you can’t tell the rush of a riptide until you’re already at sea.

I sit on the bare floor, leave my palms unturned, and watch relief pool into one hand, and uncertainty in the next. I will try not to lean more one way or another, but let them hold each other as company.

We’re in spring and I have learned how to be gentle and sharp; strong bark on budding trees. Hold out your hands. I’ll leave a pink kiss and a pocket knife.

I’m remembering again, how loneliness has always made me brave.

I will still live like a ghost in the mornings; walking, listening, pouring coffee to finish sometime by the afternoon, when I’ve had enough of watching the world and do all I can to live in it.

The world will be loud again. I’ll notice the loneliness less.

Mrs. Tiggy-winkle’s hand, holding the tea-cup, was very very brown, and very very wrinkly with the soap-suds; and all through her gown and her cap, there were HAIRPINS sticking wrong end out; so that Lucie didn’t like to sit too near her.

Maintains its hold with such unfailing sway, We feel it e’en in age, and at our latest day.

It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.

I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.

With a firm and steadfast mind one should hold under all conditions, that everywhere the earth is below and the sky above and to the energetic man, every region is his fatherland.

A despot doesn’t fear eloquent writers preaching freedom- he fears a drunken poet who may crack a joke that will take hold.

He tasted deeper, holding himself over me, and suddenly he was everywhere; his knee trapping my leg, his lips grazing warm, rough, sensuous. He splayed his hand at the small of my back, holding me tightly, driving me to sink my fingers deeper into him, clinging to him as if letting go would mean losing part of myself.

We’re each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?