The Only Thing

For now, there is no distance between us.  How often does that happen?  You read, my words in your ears -- it does not matter if you have never heard my voice.  Nothing competes for attention.  You're here -- I'm here.  You, who may, right now, be sleeping thousands of miles away, where my today is your yesterday.  

What better gift is there?  Being, with someone.  Presence -- the best present of all, goes the hackneyed phrase.  So groan.  Is it not so?  

If I let myself drift back, into memory, the earliest of this life's memories, there it is, the same.  Looking out, from the isolation of within.  There are others, they hover about me, they surround me.  Do their eyes meet mine?  Do they hold me, sit with me, walk with me -- with me -- in truth, in essence?  Or do their minds wander, thinking of work, thinking of others, planning dinner, replaying scenes.  Physically alongside, but gone fishing.

Was I lonely?  How would I have known?  Being shown the way, the many roads that all lead within.  Seeing yes, this is me, with more and more accumulating to prove it. Ah, that is them -- they do those things.  But once in a while, he read to me.  With me, and truly with me, the world of words bridging our scurrying imaginations.  And every so often, she held me, she was all there was of me.  

So many years spent reaching.  Expecting connection, assuming this was how it was done, all this talking and sizing up.  Looking at.  Looking out.  

Well, someone might have said!  It is easy, here, just be.  Just be here, with me.  

It happens, of course.  Connections occur, we know not how, we feel our way into them and wonder at the power of it.  Like attracting like, some say -- as if it were so great a secret, a magic, a thing to control and use.  If one were to think about it.

The beautiful moments, they are serendipitous.  The words that play, the eyes that meet, the hands that touch, the boundaries that dissolve.  We can do so many things together, and we do, yet the thing that works -- the alchemy of it all -- is in the not doing.  Is in the knowing, not the desire.

Have I ever searched for anything else?