the wind is sliding through the leaves of trees behind my house, pulling them with whispers. at times, it touches the flat glass windowpanes, with a strange tapping sound. objectively, the noise is caused by the glass rattling gently in its housing, but quite honestly, it seems sometimes as though someone or something were gently knock-knocking with a cold ephemeral fingertip. i half expect to look at the window, and see some floating cloud-like face gazing in upon me...

i can't sleep. i was exhausted earlier, and collapsed at around 9 or 10... but now i am awake, and can't sink back into dead dreams... i walked over to the kids' rooms, stirred them in their dreams with whispers of "i love you," and wrapped their blankets around their shifting bodies like clouds... i think love, especially parental love, is like that: a soft and warm enveloping, especially when your eyes are closed and you aren't aware... i wish such love would come back to me, encase me like another womb, so i can dream the lightning and mist of some wonderful stratosphere again- instead of being the only waking soul in a cold and window-rattled house...

***

i speak to my grandmother, as i speak to god, in these empty moments, and in the moments that seem to drag and pull at me with an insistent despair. sometimes, many times, i feel so inadequate. my past, a disappointment, and the future, a long "green mile" of imprisonment and futility... i am filled with good intentions, and perhaps my grandma saw that in me, and believed in that within me... but now i am on my own, and good intentions count for little if they do not bear fruit. there is nothing worse than a broken promise...

so i speak to grandmother, and god, and i talk about my feelings, just as i would on hot afternoons, across from her at her dining table, with some aloha iced tea sweating in a can, and some unagi over stale rice that she hadn't eaten... funny. i believe in ghosts more than most people, but the spirits of ancestors never speak to me as they do others, never fill me with comfort or teach me lessons... or maybe i'm just too blind and stupid to see...

***

the morning paper is slapping on the pavements of nearby houses... i really must sleep.

i wish, at times, i could end these empty moments... or, failing that, make them last forever, without time interrupting with each new glaring tomorrow...