Time

Time. It is a fickle bitch. It flexes and changes to fit different situations and never in the same way twice. You can stretch time .. you can waste it .. you can save it .. you can stop it .. you can find it .. ect. Sometimes you can not control what time does .. sometimes it gets away from you.

So what brought up the subject of Time? Kaioba.

There was a point .. many many years ago ... when time stood still for me with Kaioba. It felt like I held it in the palm of my hand ... like a drop of water frozen mid splash. I could examine it .. savor it ... and enjoy it. It did not seem to change or fluctuate much. Time moved around moments with Kai like water around a large stone in the stream.

Then things went terribly wrong. I suppose I am to blame for that. In my absence I think I let something happen to what Kai and I had between us. When I returned it was not the same. She was angry. She attacked my identity .. who I am as a man. I could not have predicted that and so when she did it I was devastated. I thought I knew Kaioba. I thought she knew me. I thought we knew each other well enough that I intended to claim her for my own as my mate.

I do not know if I was naive or if Kaioba changed during the time I was gone. Only Kai knows that. What I do know is that the woman that I returned to was not the woman I would claim. She was like a stranger to me. I think perhaps that I hurt her by leaving the way I did for she could not spend much time around me and has spent the last few years on some kind of self awareness search that has taken her away from the First Wagons ... and away from me. Briefly she would at times return and tell me she was back .. only to disappear again. After awhile I got to where I was accustomed to her absence .. my life closed around the missing void and filled it in with the richness of Plains life.

It took me a long time to come to the thought of taking a mate again. A very long time. I have different ideas about taking a mate now .. than I did before. There are rules to the taking of a mate now .. rules that were not there before. Things I feel I have learned from the experience and that I mean to take with me into the next ... whatever that may be.

Kai has been back longer this time than any time before. She has made it clear to me that her feelings are as they were those many years ago. But my feelings are not the same. It is as if I tried to grasp that drop of water and it slipped through my fingers. There is no bitterness .. there is no dismissal of her because of what came before ... there is simply a breath of memory left as it moves across my empty hand.

Whatever Kaioba and I shared .. is gone. Whatever may or may not be built again will have to be something new. Something that has not been before. Something that fits the new rules and new ideas that I have grown into over those years that I stood alone and faced the consequences of my own mistakes.

Time. It is just one more scar I carry that helps identify who and what I am.