I Look for Quiet Places

Rilke said that as we get older our partner's role is to help guard our solitude

a big change from youth when we think we need to fill our days with bustling about

getting things done, making plans, little thought to horizons, rather, pushing past them

finding new ones

and conversations

the constant sound of others clattering about in our ill defined spaces

with push pins on the walls

Ideas or images held onto pock marked sheet rock with carelessly cut edges

Rooms with poor lighting and beer stained carpets and 

collections of found objects meant to become art

some day

Shared or lent, communal places without the rules

Noisy running refrigerators with nothing but condiments 

and no one ever filled the ice cube tray

Bookshelves filled with textbooks and journals we purchased

with interesting paper inside them, sometimes handmade, or cheap ones decorated on the outside so as to invite us to those blank pages waiting for 

a dose of insight

about moments that stacked together to make a day

or late night rants describing the pains

and ecstasy of casual encounters

that started off with a spark of something that felt like

possibility

It's quiet space I value now

and I find myself looking for windows of

opportunity to open those journals that have been dragged around

for decades, now with empty yellow paper

that I can fill with this life 

grateful for better walls which hold art I made or collected, photographs, simple works

that have become old friends who speak softly

and who find their way to the pages.