Maybe Love Travels

Maybe Love Travels

Week 170

Euphoria from exercise. This morning it occurred to me to go jog, 30 seconds running, 30 seconds walking, with Machi’s dog Bravo. I ran in the fog early before the avenue stores had pulled up their gray metal gates. Lovely shades of gray. Concrete, gates, fog. The streets still clean from last night’s storm. And last night Machi called. He called me. At first I didn’t know his voice. All through my run I did his dwells, the Buddhist meditation I did for him when he was a boy, that first year Ori was gone, that first prison term that seemed so long at the time. May you dwell in the heart, may you be free of suffering, may you be healed, may you be at peace, may your heart flower, may you know the joy of your own true being, may you heal into this moment, may you be at peace. The perfect prayer. I have been doing it every moment I remember to do it. Whenever I am walking Bravo, any time I am walking at all. When I do it I can sometimes almost see Machi’s face in my mind’s eye. And maybe love travels. I think of Machi and then I think of Ori as I pray. I discipline myself to think of me.
And last night Machi called me.
I heard the hello and I didn’t know the voice at first. Or I did know it but I was afraid to believe. Or the voice now has some of Ori’s tones and for half a second I didn’t know which of my missing men, my desaparecidos, my longing might have conjured. “Hello Ma.” He asked me how I was. He said, “I’m sorry I put my stress on you.” I was afraid if I spoke I’d make the voice go away. “We’ve got to go find Pa. I’ve been thinking and I’ve decided we’ve got to go to Ventura on a sailboat and join the other orphans and widows camping outside La Base.”