From a notebook found in the bottom of a handbag

 It was hurricane season but I was in a place where the storms weren't a fact of life.  

I prefer the silence these days, these moments. Clean, blank. 

I think of Want as a country of its own, an isle cut of at least once a day from the rest of the world. Like Osea. 

I remember when I discovered that fire had a sound - like a gasp, a sigh, that it was something alive. There was so much possibility and then it was over, just like a match we had lit to watch burn. At least that's what I thought, at the time.

I look up and see the bats moving in to the barn and I don't think I am done yet. I just have to decide to keep having the best nights of my life so far. But how often can you walk to the edge of sanity and back before you tip over into the abyss? When the child's luck is asleep, even though Love follows. 

Stories are the prayers and the memories of those who came before and those who will follow. And in this story, her body was to not be lost in the land of the of the living even as she slid down the granite cliff face.  She had been let out of the box and she was not going back in. 

But it is so easy to be impatient, to want to fast-forward to the middle of the story, that reckless dangerous part where anything can happen. 

Three hours later, I am in Paris, en route to Strasbourg. And still pleased I didn't take the train but also pleased I planned my own itinerary. If I hadn't look at the map, this journey would have taken an additional 12 hours. The family beside me are from Singapore, having explored London. I'm listening to their conversation over an audiobook with lines like 'It's people like you who give kidnapping a bad name.' A few weeks later I have a disturbing conversation about Mengele with someone whose grandmother survived experiments. The juxtaposition of a medical coat, deceptively kind eyes and soft hands make up the angel of death in my dreams. Sometimes, I am still that terrified and bewildered 8-year-old who had wandered off at Dachau.