Draft - it is everywhere

Since you asked me directly, I can tell you about it, only indirectly. The weeks and months and years now that it happened, and still happens from time to time when I am really paying attention and ready to play. It's been a while since we cat-and-moused, keep-away, red rover, fill-in-the__________. Those were my favorite, and the hardest days. Clues everywhere, even the garbage in the street, shouted meaningful missives when I was listening. You talked my ears raw, made me feel a little crazy from time to time. No one else would understand it like it happened, no one else is meant to, I suppose, so if I want to share then I have to wait until I am asked. Even then it's not direct, even though you asked as if you already know, too, I cannot say it plainly, but I can try to show you - don't blink or you'll miss it. It started with noticing, well, that's not true. Or not entirely true, first there was the yearning. I wanted to know something. I had no idea what I wanted to know but I knew a lot of people seemed to find a lot of stuff in church when they wanted to Know things — they knocked at the altar. Not to worry, that is not my story — or not a very big part of it anyway. In the beginning, it came cloaked as divinity, a familiar costume and unlikely to spook me, and after all, I was already wanting to know. That phase didn't last long, a calling - wrong number, trying to escape the contradictions, a broken book full of them. The ensuing chase, now that was divine, even as your cloak fell away, our entanglement specifically luxurious and brief as an Edwardian era. I forced your invisible hand, demanded reckoning for every forgiveness, made too big a deal, shook the curtain and felt childish for my bland neediness, the physical dependency on your shows of proof, macro displays there for the taking all this time, trying to steal what you always had on offer at no cost. The reflection as a terrible aching tooth, harvesting care roots and sharing a hutch, even still if you can catch the swing of it and prove it to be scrutinized microscopically, everything had meaning, nothing was wasted except on me, it didn't sit that well from time to time. You showed up everywhere, showed me everywhere, every fold and angle, it was there, even in an old fat man running in his dressing gown. Where am I in that? I asked, then I could smell myself as him, recognized his stride, familiar as I walk now exactly in his steps. I was as they were when this was his place, his sense of himself that stayed — that's not all, doesn't even begin the beginning of the story of the single history of how underneath the underneath of this, one man in a gown, even from that random slice, you can kaleidoscope effortlessly to yourself, or anyone else, anywhere else, the same place.