i woke up thinking about being a stray. a stray who comes in late, late to life, in late life, still stray, a grateful stray, still out there. a stray is sort of everywhere. anxious. a stray is rooted to the spot, hovering in place, for fear it will all be taken away.

then i read jon katz. he was writing about missing. all the animals and people who passed through his writing, life. his readers miss them, but not he. he wrote so many lines about other people's missing i wonder if he misses missing himself. he says maybe it's his detachment as a reporter, or his subconscious saving him from the trap of nostalgia. 

i think nostalgia is an inborn thing, and detachment may be a protection, or a way to function. what is interesting to me is how nostalgia relates to memory, and how consciousness goes back and forth, and in and out, and we are porous to the influences of what is in our subconscious in our present conscious thought. we say forget and go on, but we go on in memory and nostalgia, because we're all of our experience, sometimes in our detachment i think we are nostalgic for the present.

welp, this is not the essay i might have written if i had the wherewithal, but what is wherewithal but trying. 

i think of walking stray thoughts. all my thoughts are strays, strays that want to be and are part of community, if community is a mystery, the thoughts that weave among us, strays walking dogs.