Autumn Sun

I walk with a slight hitch in my step.  One leg longer the other.  Every day since birth... telling that story of why I walk with a limp, but that’s beside the point.  The sun is golden today and lights up the sporadic clumps of moss along the path.  Looking left as I cross a bridge there is a slight hill and a tree which has lost it leaves.  The tree stands at the crest of the hill which is outlined in the golden sun.  A dog and a girl sit on the hill amidst the leaves and as I stare into the sun looking after them my head begins to swim and I’m sure they’ve grown wings and flown away.

I walk on up and along the road. 

Some melodic nostalgia infects me as dust particles rain down like fairies bottled up in rays of light. As my incongruous hip clicks with each step and I’m vaguely aware of the children stopping and watching from the other side of the road. I think about knowing self... if who we are is defined on how we view ourselves, isn’t the self who I am at the moment just something I’ve made up.  If that’s the case, and I may have confused a self in there at some point or another, I’m just going to say that all that really means is that I can be whoever I want to be.  I could be a dinosaur, or a knight, or whatever odd fetish I want to feed into. What strange creatures we are. 

Thinking when we walk into the room everyone is looking at us and really everyone is looking at how we are looking at them, or they are just completely disregarding us... or in my case feeling sorry for us.

The sun is blazing through the bare and wrinkled arms of the trees that line the road.  It turns the few remaining leaves impossibly red, orange, and yellow.  That brilliant oval of fire, a flaming ocean, warming us billions of miles away.  I wonder what the sun thinks of us... and what would a day as the sun be like... humans dependent on this body for existence, but not paying it any attention unless it has annoyed them by staying hidden several days in a row. 

But we are all suns... no matter who orbits us... no matter the number or lack there of.

I’ve crossed the road and I am turning onto a familiar street.  Everything is caught in some ethereal glow as if it is less than temporary and as I walk with a slight hitch in my step I see my home bathing there in light.  The hedge growing to and fro, the grass that I planted with the short metal spade, the drive awash in amber moss.

I feel a stranger slipping the key into the door, but comfortable and at home.

I push open the door.

How can a place feel so different here in the same place it always is... maybe the places we go are as different as the person we are when we go them...

How have I changed then so much since I walked out this morning.  Is it possible we don’t even know ourselves when we are changing?  It just happens somehow... and at times it may just be the passing of a mood, but at others the setting of the sun.

The sun streams in through the door and I am caught in my own shadow all wrapped up in burnished gold.

I am me.