A Letter to Myself at Just the Right Time

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It was just before I first truly met you. I saw you through my own window slowly making your way from the fire escape to the accessible ledge near the rain gutter. I was staring out through the veiled pane at the cityscape wondering whose lights were still on and what kept them up. When I noticed you I immediately stopped concerning myself with countless strangers in distant windows and started having a relationship with the singular one in my own. I didn’t want to startle you as you were

nervously assessing the height difference of the concrete and pavement below just one step out in front of you.

I made myself known by singing my favorite portion of American Pie as I made my own way onto the fire escape…

And in the streets the children screamed, the lovers cried and the poets dreamed,

but not a word was spoken,

the church bells all were broken.

And the three men I admired most

The Father, Son and the Holy Ghost

they caught the last train for the coast

the day the music died….

I didnt know your name but I called you Heath nonetheless. You corrected me immediately, so focused on your personal mission, you failed to see my horrible joke as being the only Ledger I knew. Nevertheless, an introduction was made and I promised to sit near you, touching you only with my words until we were both ready to turn in for the night, or we were both prepared to take a leap of no faith. Somehow you believed I was serious about jumping with you

and you were willing to listen do whatever I had to say.

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I told you I kept the last fluted shot glass

I ever tasted a bit of bourbon from resting on the ledge above my kitchen sink.

I told you I kept a dried and drooping Iris in this waterless vase since it was first given to me by a dear friend when my favorite teacher died in a car crash. I told you the limp flower might of appeared dead to the world but I always thought of it as simply waiting to be watered. I spoke nicely to it every morning as I filled the kettle for tea occasionally adding a few drops to the glass for good measure I never had the heart to toss out the flower as a glass half full beats a glass completly empty any day. And besides, I might otherwise refill it with bourbon which would be bad for the flowers memory and mine.

You said I could call you Heath if I wanted to I replied you could call me Iris if you so wished. You asked if I was truly willing to jump myself with a stranger I said “Heath, remember I’m Iris we’ve already met we’re no longer strangers and besides” I said

“I will only have security when you have hope” for I could never deter a person who truly had nothing to lose. I asked you your favorite number. My question seemed to soften you somehow.

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Your answer softened me as it was my own

“Eight”

So it begged the question “why?”

You said you were born in August

and that you loved turning eternity on its head to listen to the ground here and now. Then, returning the question to me “why is it yours?,” I said I first fell in love with the number eight when I was trying to pet a cat perched in the frame of what was to be a window in the kitchen one would look out from if they were standing at the sink in a house being built by a neighbor as a child.

I told you I was so focused on my mission of caressing the animal

I neglected to see the jagged edge of the broken pane jutting out on the ground at

knee height,

and I walked right into it before making contact with Garfield. I’ve always had a habit naming things I didn’t know, that we might become better acquainted. I ended up getting eight stitches that day, and it was the last time I remembered my father showing grave concern for my well being. Besides, the two remnant chicken pox above the scar line from the stitches

made a happy face when I would kneel to pray on my right knee cap.

You asked, if that was how I first fell in love with the number eight, why was I still in love with it?

I replied “That’s simple, Because seven symbolizes completion,

So eight represents a new beginning,”

After sitting together for a brief while in silence

You asked “So what is to come of all of this?”

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I suggested that Heath and Iris

would meet up each night to talk on the metal landing.

That we’d each bring an example

of the number eight we had seen that day

as a way of continuing to search for new beginnings together and apart. That we’d each share until we were ready to go to sleep, and if ever one or the other of us wasn’t there for some reason

we each promised to share our stories with the city below, and the wind above it,

while wishing the other well.

Sometimes in trying to escape the fire

we are pushed to the edge.

Sometimes when we are pushed to the edge we need someone to sit beside us and listen.

Sometimes when we are ready to say goodbye to everything we’ve ever known and loved we need someone to sit beside us and remind us of new beginnings.

Sometimes when we are trying to care for something we don’t see how we will be wounded in the process. Sometimes a small wound leads to a greater healing. Sometimes a place of escape becomes a place of being saved.

Sometimes we’re all just waiting to be watered.

Sometimes we meet ourselves

in the reflection of another, even a stranger we grow to love and the whole wide world becomes small enough to give everything another chance. Sometimes we all just need a new beginning.