The Butterfly Lamp

This morning I am at a coffee shop waiting for a friend I do not particularly want to see, though I am feeling unusually charitable towards her today. Towards everyone, really. And yet, I am almost sad and I feel that tears are somewhere very close by.

I think my life is about to take a strange and wondrous turn. But this has me scared. It is both terrifying and beautiful to see how divergent my life has become from the plans that were made for it- by me, my mother, my teachers, anyone who cared to impose a guess on me of what I ought to do.

This randomness permeates me utterly. And it is a great and terrible beauty. I like this coffee shop because of its atmosphere. On the window sills there are various knick knacks. An old folk artish looking lighthouse, about a foot tall. A blue jug. An African mask. The ugliest birdhouse I have ever seen. And a copper lamp that's it's own screened in room. It has four tall sides where butterflies and plants snake upwards. The top is geometric and the whole thing looks it was made by someone who likes Frank Lloyd Wright houses. You can put a candle inside. I wonder if anyone will ever put a candle inside this one again, or if they ever did.

Tomorrow afternoon my boyfriend is going to come and visit me. We'll talk and sit around my apartment together like we do every weekend. We'll have the same complaints about our jobs and the 90 or so miles of distance between us. And we'll trade the same jokes, which is our way of saying, we're still us, right? Right. And he will tell me about his week, and he will ask about mine. And I'll remember that lamp, and wonder if I should bring it up. Because it might change in the telling, or I might just fail to convey it utterly, and I want the lamp to remain what it is. Here, just like it is in the windowsill, innocent, our relationship utterly hermetic.

I might risk the lamp for him, though. We'll have to see. I like that phrase, I'll see or we'll see. In parent speak, learned in my childhood, I found it simply meant, 'no but not no right now in order to prevent you from pitching a huge fit.' Now in my childless universe, it means that we leave room for the moment to surprise us.

I think I am coming to terms with not knowing how it ends. I might even like it. The randomness of everything, though, brings me to tears. Things feel so full of possibility that they, by necessity, fold themselves into a metaphor that is day to day sized. And the metaphor is this. That I have met a beautiful woman with shining tears in her eyes. They look like tiny diamonds floating on a lake. And we understand eachother. There is something she wanted to tell me all along, but could not. I had to find it out myself, and now that I have, we are reconciled, she and I, and I am welcome back again to this place that is so expansive it could break your heart.