I can smell the past, a poem of times before

 I could smell the past on the wind at the bus stop, the way that cigarette smoke landed on the asphalt like ashes of my time at the Occupy Pittsburg movement.

I could smell the past, like I was back in my tent, waking up. I walked past the busy people and floated back to a different time. A time elegant and different, where a beautiful boy told me to stop and smell the roses, as an afterthought.

He was a beautiful man with long, dark hair and a mischievous grin. I smoked weed with him under a bridge. We listened to a mom and her child bicker in their tent somewhere to the side. They were just lying there, with their eyes bright. They were who they really were, before society told them to be something else. Genuine living was obsolete, even then, as our ashes fell to the ground and the man told me about his dream to have his own spaceship, and fly to outer space. As if there, in outer space, the things that tormented him would fall away.

I could smell the past as I walked through Shady Grove station. All of the busy people, their different stories woven into the tapestry woven by God. I was high on the buzz of doing good in my language classes and I went back to a place where I was a different girl, new to activism. I loved the taste of coffee. I loved the frigid air and the electric blankets that kept me warm when I slept outside in Pittsburg winters, even though I did not have to.

The beautiful man was my first love. He taught me to live in my pain. As I walked to the bus stop, I sat by a lady wearing a bonnet and a warm winter coat. I wondered what her story was. She was looking at her phone, busy like a bee wandering around a strange forest.

And the ashes fell, and landed where they may. There was a red fire warming me up. I could remember echoes of an old dream, to become a shaman and to walk through this world with honor and hope. I was to be a steward of an old man’s dream. I could only hope to walk, my heart wide open for the Great Spirit, hoping He - She, Them, in whatever form They may grace us with - would pick me, shine Their Great Light upon me.

Pick me, I screamed. Pick me for a great journey, to travel under a star-lit sky. I would go somewhere else, that was for certain. And one day in the future, I would smell today.