The Imperfect Practice

He was like music in the wind.  One moment, the wind is in your favor, and the music is so strong that y ou can hear every breath, every pluck, every note so clearly, as if surrounded by an embrace. A melody tickling, prickling like hot breath on your neck. The next,  you are only left with an echo of a song and what is in your memory as the wind carries the music away from you. You can hum along, but you know that soon even the melody will be a memory.  That's how he was to her, and she knew it. He could not be held down, he could not be caught. She always knew the winds would change, and carry him away.  But she could never be mad, because she knew it was serendipitous that she ever heard the music in the first place. 

She rolled her eyes - nothing seemed to fit anymore. She scrubbed her hands across her forehead, trying to decide what made the best first impression. And what still fit her? As she scanned her closet, she tried to remember where she had stored all of her old clothes. The  old old  clothes. The ones that hadn't fit since... Bottom of the other closet. Sure enough, everything sorted and stored.  She pulled out the boxes and bags, trying to remember what she had kept. There was a time she thought that none of it would truly ever fit again, and she remembered getting rid of a lot of pieces she would love to have right now. But that was also a long time ago... She began digging through each bag and bin in the order it would get stacked back into the closet, continuing to purge and clean along the way, while also building a pile of clothes to try on. She made quick work of it, as she usually did. But this time, it was the excitement with intermittent anxiety th...

Love letters used to mean so much to her. She kept them - because she thought that words were so important. As she dug through the piles and envelopes years later, she couldn't help but feel like she was a bit of an idiot. It sounds harsh, but that's how she felt. In her hands were thousands of words proclaiming love never-ending, and yet she still felt so alone.  "We fit together pretty well, don't we?" She had thought the same - so much so that she had been willing to move halfway across the country so they could be together. But that fell apart when he said he couldn't promise a relationship when she got out there - how messed up is that? Another letter from another lover signaled the beginning of the end. "I don't want to get a cat because that means that I am not everything you need." She fumed at that letter - at the time and in retrospect.  Then she found what she was really looking for. A part of her hoped that she wasn't going ...