You pin it all to paper, mindmap tendrils – everything you can think of.  Plot.  Erase.  Extend.  Truncate. Imagine.  Vision.  Your life in outline.  A way forward across treacherous territory platted, owned in red, blue, purple – green for maybe, maybe not.  But you have forgotten that it’s all just a snapshot, like the Tarot cards you read, understanding their tentative warning:  “all things staying the same.”  Somehow this plan seems too real to fall under the rule of change. It is so pretty, makes such sense.  Surely application and focus will allow you to follow.  You forget the things gone missing:  the snake under the rock your traveling foot jostles; the paths the geese fly overhead calling you to your one true life; the smell of the sea at low tide beckoning your hurried steps to slow, stay a spell, become enchanted.

Reviewing pages in journals, photos in albums, you remember all the moments whose reality is not charted, long for a space where you can place the truth of what your heart yearns for without the overlay of should.  Perhaps your shoulders shake a bit as you choke back what is rising to your throat – a word, a cry, a sound of grief so deep the fairies gather to see what will happen.  It isn’t always about being strong.  Sometimes it is about surrender.