The Traveler's Bones

It is interesting, sometimes, the wonderings that people have about my wandering soul. This life is--and is not--as it appears.

This story is not so extraordinary. It involves the same stuff that you are made up of. It is mostly imagination, lots of fear, a dash of organizing, and mostly making it up as you go along.  Perhaps my little journey--dressed up in far more exotic or fancy trappings and wrapped in idealism or ribaldry and bardic poetry--it is really a working manifestation of an alternate little life I would not have expected to live.

See (and I've said it before), you and I are travelers, Time Travelers. Whether our journeys are large or small, a grand sojourn or just the pathway from house, to work, and back again--we are going places, and our mileage is calculated by birthdays. We have no choice but to travel this time and space allotted to us.

Know, too, that your flesh, bones, breath and heart will calculate your mileage--each journey making your body and soul a verifiable clock of your experiences. What scars and weathering will they leave?

If, long from now, they open my casket and examine my skeleton, what would they see?  Would they see the long bones stretched by so much sojourning, bent by the weight of the grand bitter-sweetness of life? Would my dusty heart show scarring--shriveled by so much silent fear shoved down whilst making everything appearing too perfect? Would they realize it's paltry grey shade hid so much heartbreak, a lonely spinster unable to know love, for who would love such a strange woman, too independent for her own good?

What of these strange hands, that wrote and wrote so much, and painted and made things and held friends, and kittens, and stroked horses


It has been a crutch, and a heartbreak, and a Fourth Of July picnic, and a burden, and a Mid-Summer celebration. It has filled me with as much awe as anxiety.