Running to Stand Still

"I wonder if there is a freedom from financial worry to be had by having enough money," Delores pondered.

"Well, of course, that's how you make it...isn't it?" Agnes snapped. She didn't like deep thought or unsweetened tea, both favorites of her best friend.

"I don't think so. The rich worry about losing what they have and they often do just that. It's worse for the middle class. When I was young and poor I had a lot more freedom from financial worry. Nothing to worry about losing...but, I don't know," Agnes furrowed her brow, "It changed when I became a mother."

"All that responsibility," Agnes concurred, stirring more sugar into her tea.

"Yes, exactly. Although my daughter is seventeen now and I don't think I'll be one of those parents who keeps supporting her children long after they cease to be children."

"You'll kick her out?" Agnes arched her eyebrows in question. She still semi-supported her children and grandchildren. It was why she worked.

"No, no, not that, but I think I may end up more of a roommate. I hate the bitterness of always giving and not receiving and that bitterness is souring my thoughts on parenting," Delores frowned, getting to the real point. "Entitlement and feeling like whatever I give is ever enough...well, it makes me want to run away."

"Then run. I always thought we should travel more," Agnes said in support. "Next year run. I'll help you move back home."

"But even the prodigal son, after wasting his inheritance, came back home and found a place and his father's support. I am likely a bad mother," Delores sank deeper into her funk and sipped her too hot tea. "I don't know what to do. About anything. I want to love, I want to run, I find myself thinking that dying -- not that I'm suicidal mind you -- but that dying wouldn't be such a bad break in the day."

"Honey," Agnes said, laying her hand over Delores' slightly trembling fingers, "a trip to the Big Apple would be a much nicer break, don't you think?"

Drowning in the Sea of Love

There is a dark side of love. Love borne out of fear, out of lack, a step away from obsession, the kind of love a drowning person has for a would-be savior they pull down into the dark, foreboding deep. Musicians sing about it while sane people shy from it -- preferring their passion set to music or the screen, well removed from day-to-day life. I always thought I was far too logical for the dark queen of love, a queen of unsettled lakes with hidden depths and far too many monsters. I was wrong.

The Philosophy of Daisies

"She loves me, she loves me not," Abigail intoned while idly dismembering a daisy. "Silly really, there's so many layers between love and not love."

"Still," Martin sighed, "It's irrational to expect philosophic depths from a daisy.

"Of course," Abigail answered, beheading the daisy with a savage twist as it ended on "she loves me not," one needs at least a chrysanthemum for that. She stood up and closed the conversation with a wicked, "Mums the word now Martin" brushing her hands off on him as he covered his head and groaned.

"Tell me, Abby," he began, "would you have been any less savage had the daisy spoken of love?"

"Of course not," Abigail answered, twirling under the cotton candy sky, "Love -- and not love -- is a savage thing." 

The Dreams of Fools

Spaceport terminals, like the airline predecessors, were a study in opposites. Large but cramped, hurried and delayed, full of intimate strangers meeting and parting and studiously ignoring one another whenever possible. T'Mara stood in her tattered clothes and gazed at her reflection in the curved glass. She looked a ghost, transparent against the darkness of space tattered by stars, dark hair, dark eyed, still while strangers passed in huddled, hurried groups behind her. 

The planet she was set to leave was not home although it had birthed her. Her family -- her father -- dreamed of the stars but they had never been her dream. Until he died, dreams unfulfilled, and she had taken her small inheritance to fulfill them in his stead. She was a fool she thought, a fool who didn't want to go adventuring but would go nonetheless, looking in reverse while charging forward in the deep night of the unknown. 

She resettled her pack and hurried forward to the gleaming needle that would spread gossamer wings to fly, powered by solar winds of invisible light as she slept and dreamed the dreams of fools.