Sunrise, sunset, repeat.

Here We Go Magic blares from two speakers behind me and white sangria is coursing in and out and in and out of my system faster than the speed of speach, gait, breath, laughter, light. I just got in (breathless) from an impromptu Girl Club on an Italian patio and am feeling alive, a light, and also adrift. All of the most important players were there, Rebecca, Sula, Hil, Lauren, Lo, Amy, Jill. These women that I needed to head bob with and smoke a single cigarette and drink sangria in the afternoon heat with. My morning began on a single note of solidarity that very quickly became a chorus of flapping birds bedazzled and top bunned and make-upped and floral patterned and tennis shoed and high heeled, throwing scandals and secrets and well wishes (of soon-to-be births) and darkness and lightness and much needed laughter across the anchor of our table littered with literature and empty cappuccino cups. If I never leave this city for another, it will be because of the women. Oh the women! It is true, this city is as littered with good women as today's table was with empty coffee mugs and half-read books. As coincidentally as the morning began, an impromptu rain shower followed suit in the late afternoon and draped itself over the neighborhood just as I walked in the door and slipped my feet out of the high heels du jour. Delighted by the perfect timing, I threw the window wide to inhale the smell and welcome the sudden temperature change. And I wrote. And I am writing.

My body has already started to listen to the subtleties of nature. Sounds ridiculous, but things sound different if given the opportunity. While guiding Jessica Alba through the streets within the past couple of days, I have been hearing birds chatter, the wind come up and slide back down to nothing, the rain, branches stretching out. A friend wrote to me and her letter was a gentle reminder that sound and space in the bush exist on a level entirely foreign to me. There will be no barely-there hum of the refrigerator, or beating of the shower in the morning. No flap of curtains, no crackle of needle meeting vinyl, or obnoxious sirens in the dead of night. "Erase it all", she wrote, "blank it out. No white noise or human distraction. It will be you, all alone; and if you allow it, you will hear the sun rise in the morning if you are very quiet". What? Okay. I laughed when I read that. She signed her letter, "just wait and see. Trust me". I trust you.

So, by tomorrow's end I will have already left the city, and gone to the country to do the last of the packing and organizing and folding. Saturday morning at dawn will call for the heaving of my hockey bag and MEC backpack into a car and I will leave for no man's land after what feels like a very long wait, moving in a dance of half terror and half delight. Maybe then I will be able to write again. Maybe I will be able to write after the dance of terror turns into an easy glide of consistency and predictability. Wake, eat, work, sleep. Maybe then I will write with ease, after I hear the sun rise for the first time in my life. Maybe, maybe not.