Walking out to the mailbox around midnight
to send 15 years of memories
and thousands of pictures of cats
on a zip drive to a former life...
Full bright moon glaring down
on a somewhat warm evening...
Just around the corner,
not five hundred feet away,
from the sound of it,
a pack of coyotes
begin barking, yipping, and howling...
I remember that sound from nights in the country
back home in Connecticut...
Fresh kill, or mating season,
some kind of celebration of their wildness
in the darkness
and it always sounded like somewhat frightful cacophony...
Like a pack of werewolves
howling at the moon
and bearing down
on fresh meat, warm flesh...
Bones cracking between their teeth...
Devouring their prey before it's even finished dying...
Back then,
I always heard them from behind a roaring fire,
or through the window,
walls safely insulating me
from the mob...
This night,
I hear them
with no protection before or around me...
They are just out of my line of sight,
but I know they are
close enough to smell my scent...
Spices and pheromones...
Musk and fenugreek...
And my response,
now,
in this moment,
is a smile...
I just listen to their song
and place the envelope in the slot...
I slowly walk back to the house...
I feel no imminent danger...
I almost feel like one of them...
I am exposed...
Pajama bottom shorts and an open vest...
Sandals on my feet...
Unarmed and vulnerable...
Unafraid in the moonlit darkness...
They are so close,
but still hidden by the shadows of the trees...
Any closer
and I would be able to smell their scent...
They are celebrating their freedom...
I close my eyes and I listen...
Soon, I will be able to celebrate my own...
Soon, I will be able to sing with them...
Run with them, if only metaphorically...
A wild animal held in a steel kennel for years,
but not broken by the experience...
I can be free...
I can choose my destiny openly,
instead of skulking in the shadows
waiting...
I can openly follow her scent...
My true mate,
not the human who tried to tame me,
domesticate me...
But a wild thing like myself...
She's been waiting for ages
for me to arrive
even though she didn't yet know my name...
But I could smell her scent in the wind
drawing me to this place...
I know now that it was her...
And I respond to her call...
My emotions in a frenzy for her
like the coyotes' song
not 500 feet away...
400 feet...
300 feet...
When my foot touched the first step of the porch,
silence...
I perched on the railing
looking over the moonlit yard
and had a cigarette...
Still silence...
Nothing moving under the shadows...
They can move like ghosts when so inclined...
But I could still feel them in the darkness of the tree line...
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