Memory of feeling

   I have fasted since Saturday.  This is the longest I have fasted-- almost three days (tonight I eat).  That I should enjoy what I have cooked, I am grateful beyond words; nevertheless, I am suffuse with a sense of being disobedient.  Last night while Seattle was beset by a windstorm, at 1:30 a.m. I went out to the backyard, into 50 degrees and gale-force gusts: with the pressure low and the wind hugging the earth, the clouds were lazy.  I waited for glimpses of the waxing moon; suddenly I felt compelled to remove my sweatshirt and shirt; before too long I had removed my pants and underwear, and I lay in the grass, waiting; and, I realized I waited to feel.  I needed to feel my joints slowly growing ever stiffer, my eyes tear then dry, and feel the cooler wetter ground beneath me as I cradled my head in hands, hearing the whistling gusts and watching the languorous migration of clouds occasionally thinning for a peek at stars and planets.  All of these wonders are little more than incidental as I dwell on the memory of the sweetest voice I heard mere hours earlier that reminded me of beauty; and, reminded me that I am a memory, imposing and un-needed.
   While a voice can be remembered, a memory alone has no voice but the one we give it.