love is all there is...

I crack open a can of Diet Coke, grab a Marlboro Ultra Light and head out the door. It�s cold outside, feels like snow. I take off my socks and lay them on the hood of my car. Dig my toes into the last of the grass in my yard, still icy and wet from the rain. I light my cigarette and take a long draw, thinking about smoking. Thinking I should stop. It�s a fleeting thought, though, and my mind doesn�t dwell there.

I remember snow. I wish I was five again, in the Rocky Mountains, digging tunnels through six foot drifts and making snow angels, walking barefoot to the outhouse, and crying for daddy because my feet are too cold to walk back; making buttery pancakes and eggs, gobbling homemade fudge from my Christmas stocking.

Carefree, I was.

I close my eyes, and will it to snow. I stick out my tongue, waiting to catch a white flake. I turn my face up to the grey sky, imagining for a moment a shimmery curtain of white, cascading to cover me. I brush invisible snowflakes from my hair.

I sigh. No snow here. At least I have the rain, I think. I lean over and put my cigarette out. Cars fly by and I wonder where they are going, what the driver�s are talking about, thinking. The Mexicans across the street laugh and hoot at some private joke unheard by me.

I saunter lazily over the hill to the dark woods behind my house; turn on the tape recorder in my pocket. I bought it just for this, to walk around and talk to myself. To record everything I say, in case some stunning poetic genius happens to dart through my mind at an inconvenient moment, in case I should not have a pen at hand. I am silent. Nothing to say today. I turn off the recorder, knowing that nothing I have to say is really worth recording anyway. I have never actually recorded anything. Still, it�s a comforting idea for me. Occasionally I have been stricken by some amazing line that I must write, yet I am in bed or at work, and have no way to copy the line down. So the moment escapes me.

So many moments have escaped me, I reflect. I have no memories of most of my life, save the bad ones. Ones that I wish I could forget, yet they pursue me tirelessly, like hounds on the hunt. I don�t really remember what happened each Christmas, nor do I remember birthdays, autumns, everydays. I don�t have any memories of long, lazy summers spent on the beach with the boy who lived next door, late night kisses and barefoot walks in the salty ocean sprays. There are no happy thoughts for me to escape into, no magic gypsy moments. Nothing to ease my mind or compare the bad to, to tell myself it will all be ok.

Only that memory of the snow in the mountains, with my daddy.

How do you get that back? That time when you were so innocent, so young. When daddy was still there to make it all ok. How do you move on without memories?

I sit on an old log, wet and rotten, and stare at my toes. Thunder rolls in the distance. I turn on my tape recorder and begin to talk, for the first time, attempting to create a memory here and now.

Ghosts in the forest duck behind trees and giggle. I know they won�t let me go so easily.

I shiver and shrug myself deeper into my coat. Winter is almost here.