Rattle

I am echoing inside, today, rattling like a key in a can.

Who am I? Who are you? Who are we?

******

"Look at that bird up there," I tell a young friend I am trying to distract from her task of pushing Sam off my lap. She stares up into blue.

"It's you," she says. "It's you in the future. Hey, Sam, look, it's your mom in the future up there!"

I swivel my head to take her in. Is it true?

I can't tell if it's vulture or a hawk.

******

I struggle at times with disappointment, sadness, frustration. Are these feelings authentic, or do they spring from my attachment to people, ideas, understandings? If the "understanding" is mine alone, where is the truth under what is standing? Which is an authentic feeling if so many arise from the way I think things ought to be? If I perceive my needs to be met, I am content.

I am a center of perception, a mirror, shiny and round. What is the sound of me in this hollow place?

********

Sam came to me three nights ago and told me his brain was going to burst.

"Why?" I asked.

"Because I am me. But Trinidad is also "me." How can that be possible?" He groaned and held his head, falling to the ground.

The echoes are not all mine.

Last night, he told me that he wrote a story at school. It goes something like this:

There was a boy named 'I Don't Know My Name," and he'd just moved to a town called Me. He went to school on the first day and his teacher said, "What's your name?"

"I Don't Know My Name," he said.

"Oh. I'll call you 'George,'" said the teacher.

"But that's not my name! My name is 'I Don't Know My Name!'"

The boy went home and told his mom, "I hate Me."

"What? Don't say you hate yourself," she said.

"I didn't. I said I hate "Me" [the town]."

That is all that Sam had written so far.

And me? This is good enough for today.