strike that

twenty twenty

Sometimes I wonder if by this point I wasn’t supposed to have made some Different Choices, bought a house or married a boy or at least kept the same job for more than a year and a half, even once.

And then I find myself lying on a wide flat rock all warm with the sun, dipping my foot into a stream that is flowing through the Siuslaw National Forest, a stream where I have just washed off the salt of the Pacific Ocean and the dust of three days' camping. And over the rock is a half-downed tree trailing ferns like prayer flags, and under the rock is a big crawdad whose orange cuts right through the blue reflected on the stream surface so he looks like a lobster in the sky. And next to me is a man singing opera, singing an aria more for himself than for me but here I am to hear it, in this perfect green corner of the world where for no reason I can think of we are all alone.

And then I think there’s not a single choice I would have made different, not ever, not one.

posted by tortaluga @ 11:14 PM