Re:

My neighborhood is very quiet this evening. I took my tea outside and had a quick cigarette on the porch. I have talked so often of my desire to quit smoking and to be honest it is only for vain reasons. I do not want the habit to age me but I do like those rare moments when I am totally alone and able to blow the whispy gray smoke into the air, only myself and the traffic is stirring. During my break, I watch the hillside to west of me. The little lights of houses dot the dark landscape. These hillside scenes are my favorite of LA and I covet most of them. I must have hundreds of mental pictures collected in my brain. As I sat and starred at the scene I could see a small car with its bright headlights moving up the hillside. I then focused my gaze to the stars above. I wondered if there were any constellations up there but I knew that there probably was but I have never been able to recognize them without the help of a friend, or even sometimes lovers.
I felt a great calm in my body. The same calm I used to feel when I smoked outside at my parents house in Indiana. Only there, the darkness seemed much darker and the woods behind my house more mysterious than the faintly illuminated hillsides that surround me now. A sadness comes over me as I write this. I know I will never again sit on that back porch to smoke as my parents site inside watching TV or fixing dinner. That chapter, like many in my life, has closed. If I had only known then what might happen in so few months, perhaps I would have taken more mental pictures and would have cherished that little house instead of feeling trapped by that area the economic circumstances by which I grew up.
I've been running from that scene for most of my life and now that I know the other side of the darkness that came before my small family, I would like nothing more than to sit there again. To take for granted that after spending some time alone with my thoughts that I would rise from smoking take one last drag of my cigarette and know that when I go inside my parents would be talking and I would sit at the dining room table and eat dinner. I remember the warmth of the room and the gross yellow lighting that I could not stand but never knew which light bulb to buy to change the color of the light. As I paint this in my mind, it seems so sweet for me to remember but it also seems so far away that I doubt I will ever trust it. One can never really know what lies in the hearts of people you love. There is always light and darkness but what lies underneath is a secret to you and I and most often seems to be a secret to themselves as well.
I cannot fully unlock my heart because I do not know what is there. I could unlock it and there could be a great force of light that floods from me with happiness to the world. Or I could unlock my heart and it be damp, cold and dangerous like a cave. Either way I feel my soul is not yet developed enough to deal with either extreme. Or if it so happened that I unlock it and let down these walls that I fortified for years, my heart might look and beat with such average emotion that I will let my brain take over, disown, and lock it so tightly that my heart cannot be seen again.
I love when my neighborhood is this quiet and I know that only myself is stirring and bothering to make small noises.