the numbers

I'm sitting on the swinging chair on a friend's porch, wrapped in the quiet of the suburbs and listening to the breeze make a dull wind chime of the winter branches. The laughter of children wafts from the school next door with the comfort of a pie cooling on a windowsill. And still it goes silent, telling me it's there by reminding me what's not: the nothing that's left without it.

Today, on this little break from the city, I finally did my bills and prepped my taxes - running the long-overdue additions and subtractions that allow my life to go as it goes. And sitting in this peace, I took a journey through the last year - each entry telling a story. A restaurant receipt from a time I came through town in need of a good conversation and a big margarita with a friend. A late-night pizza at the end of a wild night that I later regretted eating. A Whole Foods total for the most beautiful meal of my life. A card I bought from a drug store and gave to someone who was hurting so much. Now, they're just thousands of bland, inconsequential yet profound little figures that meant so much at the time ... thousands of small moments and big expenses, all those connections and trials, celebrations and laments. And then there are all the travels - the whirlwind trips and rootlessness, high adventures and directionless spinning movements.

All the things I neglected to write down - those moments I'd like my brain to fight to retain - are in these numbers, in a code only I can crack. The bottle I brought to an amazing Christmas party in Maine, and the bottle I bought on my way back down the coast. The provisions for a spring sail with friends that lasted all day and into the night.

In a few days the taxes will be filed and all this paperwork will be tucked away in a manila folder in a storage unit where I've been keeping all these things. But now that I have them in front of me, I pour over them - making myself coffee and reading them over like a scholar. They hold so much.

Though now it's quiet and the dust has settled on this year. Children laugh. Branches click. Tall grass sounds a comfortable sush. And still it goes silent, telling me what's there by reminding me what's not.