“And yesterday I saw you kissing tiny flowers,
But all that lives is born to die.
And so I say to you that nothing really matters,
And all you do is stand and cry.”
I’m shouting your name on a street corner. It’s not midnight yet, but I go to bed early these days. This is like somebody else’s midnight, I guess. This is like somebody else’s middle of the day, or middle of their shift at a job they actually like (so much time to think— in the quiet, as the rest of the world, or the world you know, sleeps, sleeps alone, sleeps alone next to the partners they love that are genuinely incapable of loving them, cold and broken from trying to mend somebody else’s cold and brokenness, you know what I mean?), or just another moment in time, moving, already gone, like all things, like how glad I am for things to go. You don’t hear me though. They never hear you. You’re just out there, all over yourself with apologies you will never be able to articulate outside of your mind no matter how many times you practice (I swear, if I could just start over. Can we just start over? Without you, my brokenness resonates like a bell tower and makes all the happy people cry. I can start over. Can we start over?), and by the “you,” of course, I mean “I.” And you’re out in the world somewhere smelling like musky vanilla and young love and I’m wondering how to find you, how to unbury you from the weight of language, from the piles of nothing done wrong. It’s nobody’s fault when things don’t work out. [it is what it is] — if you can believe that is another story.
This morning while in my favorite coffee shop ever, I found myself in near tears over a song that does not distinctly remind me of something heavy of my own life, but of my partner’s. This song reminds him of another person, and I take it personally, even though I know that is ridiculous. That’s the nature of me though— sensitive, concerned, heavily invested 100% of all the times. The song is playing these notes and it’s this beautiful, live, acousticy version of a song I used to go crazy over, a song everyone who knows the words to loves to sing along with, a song that is soft and good and hopeful most of all. Knowing that kind of hope rested within him at any time is far away from me, something I’ve never personally come into contact with, only in his past through things I’ve read that he’s written, codes and evidence and incriminations of a former romantic left dribbled all over the internet in different ways, slaughtered by his own self and concerns and the promise that destiny makes us all that “this too shall pass.” I say this and hope not to sound critical. Something I love of the internet is the depth in which I saw so many of my peers releasing themselves, maybe hiding behind code names on AIM or livejournal, but still honesty filled lines like swearing on a Bible and it was like a version of us all behind a screen— and I think this is a gift of my generation. I’ve never been great at being this person, the one writing, in front of other people because I write impulsively, working these moments and hot flashes and the pain of experience purging out of me sometimes in a crude way. I don’t know. I just realize that all this access to the depths of people can also harm you, show you sides of people you maybe could love but maybe aren’t ready for yet. What is there left for you to know of me? My secrets all drenching every blog site available and my radiance pouring from my fingers onto something less imaginative, accessible to your judgments and interpretations and misunderstandings. Hot in the moment and just the way I like it. I guess at the end of the day I am crying in a coffee shop on a hot summer day because of something I’ve made up and because of a lack of feeling in my life today— and today alone. Let’s keep that in mind.
And since I’m being honest here, that hope that hopes inside of my lover (even long since gone and all that) gives me hope that maybe hope can formulate inside him once again. It was hope that saved me, and hope that kills me every draining day of my life. The question is how do I know if I am the one to hold onto a blessing or let it go? Maybe that’s not the question it sounds like, but it’s the one I’m asking.
It wasn’t that song playing, but it’s that song that fits where I’m at from the one you left. In case you are wondering, I am the one crying.
Shoe Bird. 