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To Dust We Have Already Returned

As I looked up at the clouds turning gray and showing their dust this evening, I wondered at all the incantations of my cells. How many pounds of times I've made myself over and dropped dust here or there? Whether my dust may have had your finger in it writing "you wish your girlfriend were this dirty" on a car. Or maybe I've been in the way of your bustling Eastern European cleaning woman, who hurries me away in a bucket. Maybe I get dumped out on the lawn, only to feed into... a thistle.

The hairs and skin and nails I've lost over the years, how many raised beds would they fill? Where have they gone?

Maybe my hair, once tight at the follicle to my scalp, so close to my skull, so close to the buzz of ideas in my brain that simply does not turn off but continues to tell stories as I sleep; maybe that hair has wrapped up in a nest and fed regurgitated ideas to baby doves. Maybe I am part of the cloud I just saw, graying and standing out against the ever bluer sky. Maybe I've made it beyond mountain tops and over oceans.

Maybe you and I have met and made lightening in the jolts of moisture between us as your dust and mine met in a monsoon over India. Maybe I'm flying right now, drifting and dreaming of buzz and idea. Maybe I've landed after all this in the red, red earth and become the dust under bare young soccer-playing feet, scuffling me under toenails and into cuts that will be easily ignored in favor of more running, more goals.

Maybe that same red earth, dust of me, I've driven it back to the snow where I need to be. Thrown myself up into a cloud and come back to Colorado. I've coated myself in a layer of snow on a powder day, making you raise your goggles, "Is the snow red?"

Maybe I've already been all the places I'd ever want to go. Maybe I'm a rainbow in Maui right now. Maybe I'm in a darkened sky and you're here reading in the pitch. Maybe...

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