The People Behind My Eyes

Sunday, April 23, 2006 - 4:02 AM

I’m always thinking about something. My head goes a hundred miles per hour and sometimes it gets uncomfortable. Then there are times when my thinking addiction doesn’t become a burden to me.

When I see a picture of a rainbow, a sticker with a rainbow, a post card, a little teddy bear with a rainbow heart I think of my friend Jersey Girl and I smile.

When I pass the gardening section and refuse to take plants home just to kill them, when I see a nice pattern on a clay tile, when I see a rose I think of my net friend and her rose gardens and I smile.

The photos of horses on Incredimail, the poem Riding Wistful Horses and the silver medallion around my neck all follow the path to my net friend who dedicates her life to horses, grayhounds and land.

I never really use to like chocolate. I guess I just didn’t have much of a taste for sweet things until I got older. I seem to crave it now. I use to say it was just down right nasty but now when I speak of chocolate it with attached to people for which I have affection. I had a foster son, age 4, he was such a tendy little boy. Sometimes he’d get on his trycle and ride around the living room in a slow circle. I’d bring him to me and we’d talk. i nicknamed him chocolate chip. He was a sweet little thing and he needed to know it because what he’d been through might cloud his memory and maybe he’d forget that he is good inside. There is one other person I’ve nicknamed Chocolate Chip. It is my hope that she remembers that the just how sweet she is and how very much she is appreciated. Heck, I use to not like chocolate at all now I nickname people after this sugary goodness. It makes me smile when I think of them both.

Of course when I see Whinny the Pooh I think of my friend in big foot country. I see articles about male survivors and think of the guy out in Cally and other male survivors I know. I have hope for them too.

I’m always thinking. I’m always pondering, analyzing, tossing this and that idea around and coming up with some plan to change the world. But when I see a sunflower I stop thinking and I start dreaming. I can pick out a sunflower in the middle of chaos the way Captain picks out a biscuit in the middle of tall grass and lawn toys. He romps and plays in the yard, then his ears go up, his tail out and there it is, he found the biscuit I hid in the grass for him. He wasn’t expecting it, it was just there to surprise him but he got a whiff of it and for a moment the entire world stops. That’s how it feels when I see a sunflower. I never expect but I always hope for it. I say the connection to sunflowers is that they are a whole slew of lives all held by one large head. Each seed has the potential to become another life that holds a thousand other lives. It’s like they are multiples. I find comfort in that. the fact that they are so tall and refuse to be overlooked, refuse to be the average foliage, to fit in with the rest, they dare to stand beautifully different. I see myself in them.

Sometimes people say that they’re doing so much in one day that it’s like they meet themselves; they bump into themselves along the way. When I see a sunflower its like meeting myself, like I’ve just looked into a mirror and that mirror says, hey Austin, remember its okay that you’re different. Keep moving forward, keep standing because someone is going to notice the effort it took to stand despite a million heads on two narrow shoulders.

I connect in some way with the people I’ve stumbled upon when I see horses, roses, rainbows or big Bowing Jets, when I see Pooh, bake chocolate chip cookies or read and reflect. I talk, I socialize, I think, but when I see a sunflower right out of the corner of my eye then the entire world stops. It’s my time to dream and time to remember that it is quite fine to stand beautifully different.

Austin’s August