1.3.15 Amara: The Right Place, and The Right Time

     Amara stands with me in the kitchen, looking about, impatient, irritable, disdainful. Getting her sealegs.

      She questions me, challenges ; is alive with retorts, as I watch and see beneath her tremulous waves. As my view becomes clearer and her brackish  23 year old backlash more understandable.

     “Hey”, I say, “ Can you just settle down a little? I get that you’re angry and lonely and sick of a lot of things. But It’s just me, here, wanting to be with you, and get what it is that is going on, for you.”

     She looks aside, a quick moment of regret passing by her rough guise, shifts on her  hip,  arms crossed tight on her chest, tough ; as she leans on the counter,  looking at me once again, this time with a small bit of consideration.

     “It’s just been hard. I’ve always been the one. To ante up, you know? To take charge and pull it together. All sheep and no wolves. I got stuck being the frigging wolf. Do you even get it?”  
     Behind her hazel eyes, I see the smallest of tears, as she quickly looks away, shakes her hair over her face a bit, right on the edge.

     And I do. I’m watching and I’m seeing beneath, the way we can sometimes when we’re young, and even more so as we grow older and learn learn what lies there under so many behaviors and  noises and posturing and anger and vehemence. We learn that all that stuff is smoke, and if we wait it out sometimes, why, it settles. If you get to have the right place, at the right time.

     So I pray this is the right place, and I do what I can to make it the right time, with my heart and my prayers and my openness to peer in to whatever of her she is willing to show. And see in there to what  she is not. With respect. Boundaries.

     And there she is,  hurt,  mistrustful,  harmed, and valiant. All the vitriol simply  the fumes of some courageous valiance.

     Not hate, not meanness; not dangerous, nor spiteful.

     Simply courage, strident and desperately cued to a life that has not been kind.

     So I stand with her. We talk about things. She asks questions, slowly lessening her animosity, her defensive jibes. I just stand there and begin to really see her, the young one, upon whose shoulders so much has been laid.

     And my awareness informs our simple conversation, about safe things and simple things. My ease and caring slips in, through her barbs and fences and warning systems, to where she very well might live, there, inside.

     And we stand in the kitchen, watching out the long line of cat-nose-smudged windows ,as the light from the setting sun flickers over the tops of  trees at the edge of the field, making them golden for just moments.

     As the moon shows its illuminated aged self, high in the sky.

     As the sunset travels silently across the land, and then is gone.