Toothless and calm

I wish I knew what those clangy metal ball things are called. They are smallish, just small enough to roll two around in one hand at a time. They usually come in small ornamental boxes and make a soothing sort of dull thumpish-clang as they move.

I have the feeling that sorrows can harden into pointed objects that rub, pierce and intrude on everyday moments like sleep, eat, breathe, walk and think. This morning, for the first time, I got the feeling that sometimes a hardened sorrow can become rounded and river-washed, sit tucked up as neat as a bird's feet in midflight.

I took to walking up the road on my way to nowhere in particular except breakfast. I had a good book under my left arm and a new pouch of tobacco in my pocket. I neither desired nor required any company. I walked right underneath a man I once fancied myself besotted with, he had climbed up a ladder and was scooping armfuls of jacaranda petals out of the gutter of a house. I suppose he lives there now, in the house near The Peach where he sometimes climbs to the roof and showers me with petals as I walk beneath his feet. Any reaction but the dread plunging drop in my stomach would have been impossible for such a scenario, last year, but this year I barely thought of him at all, I just laughed in the midst of my delicate purple shower. I neither looked up towards him or deliberately kept my gaze cast down. I found my merry stride unbroken as I heard the first dull thumpish clang.

I wish I knew what those metal balls are called because this morning it occurred to me that I might have some lodged in the middle parts of me, right under the ribcage somewhere between heart and stomach. Don't come racing over with your x-ray machines. I don't think its important to conduct tests to determine whether they are real or imagined. I am quite sure it is just the dull and soothing clang of old sorrows gone toothless and calm.