My feet carried me through a dark alley and further into the night. I traced my hands along the narrow walls lining the alley. Cold and damp, that familiar smell of a cellar, where I breath in the past. It is an old breath that fills my nostrils and prodes my memories in to immediate action. There, down the stairs and round the corner it sits and awaits my coming.

From afar I hear your voice. It travels down the same straight stairs. Here word and ear meet of one grandmother and grandson. Today the meeting is free of any physical binds. I have forgotten the words. But I remember you standing in the kitchen. Apron around your waist, ladle or spoon at hand, something cooking on the stove. I wish I knew what you wore on your feet. Surely you weren’t barefoot! And your hands? Did you stick them into the pockets of your apron as you overlooked your doing? Or did they handle plates and cutlery as you set the table? I didn’t observe your fingers then. I do now. The hands weary, oh many ladles passed through their grip and release, and many soups and dishes they guided to hungry family and friend. Not that I truly remember. It’s a thought that passes as we touch the warmth of our hands together. I observe yours,  and rest my attention on your fingers and nails. I think to myself they are beautiful. Autumn swept your worn leaves away, your fingernails remain untouched. Youth in those nails. What contact they must have had as your hand reached out to connect to the world.

In dreams I fly. I lift off the ground effortlessly. I am unchallenged by doubt or any order of thought. I fly as I walk.  The ease and innate trust of letting go. The feeling rouses me, but only in writing, for in flight I am free. You see, I retain my human form and don’t flap my arms. In effect, I loose my physical boundary, which separates me from the world. I am air, though human mass, and materialize in  space free to move as I please. What strikes me, is the unquestioned progression of being across all dimension. Flight itself is insignificant, I thirst for the experience of being boundless. A moment of mindless recognition, of expansion, of touching the heart to the cheek of creation in a song of outmost peace, expressed solely by stepping beyond and aside, simply to allow. To allow the song to be flight and form in its very nature revealed. Then, it is not my flight or my doing, only at the verge of consciousness my wakeful being. Ever more.

This iceberg shifts its weight in a low bow I cannot understand. I seek to comfort, but fail. So heavy. So ever full. Something bursts on the surface and something within. I sit and listen. Yesterday – I sit and listen. Tomorrow – I sit and listen. In this eternity the iceberg releases itself deeper and slides beneath my bare feet. Where skin touches ice, I dream of our sublime meeting. It is hard to bear in true presence and with eyes open. I need to feel you. Run with you. Breath along your side. I hesitate. Today – I only sit and listen.

On your periphery the sky mirrors its silent presence, and the clouds draw in the scene. You dance in me and echo the vibrance of human suffering. The lump in my throat imitates the mass of tears that forged you with time and time again. Still, I cannot understand. Why? Why this suffering, iceberg? Why this lame and shallow tango? Feet dragging in limb pose, no color draped, turning and twisting man or woman, no attendee in sync with waltz or jive. I hear the music! I hear the music, screams my heart, but only a skip and spin in memory’s embrace, where you melt and return all tears to the ocean, and the humans to their beds, where they may rest and dream.

The „why“ grows faint as the clouds disperse your image into the universe. I pain, you pain – pain. And tears well and ice melts and humans have sat and listened, and suffered, and always will. I miss the dance as the music beckons me to lift my legs and shuffle my feet, shake off the blinding dust of suffering and lunge into the tune, to slip my own tears out of my body and into the sea, and slip out of my heavy garment I cannot shoulder, cannot understand. A little disco, jazz and mambo – they too have a place and name like suffering, but I, I need just dance.