July, My love

Kept my windows rolled down and the heat high. February was suicide and I was doing my best to avoid it. Listen to Pet Sounds a lot. Take short walks whenever the air wasn't crippling. Pretend. Pretend the summer. 

Close my eyes.

Sun on my skin.

The sound of the water near.

There were good days and I remember them. 

My hair was getting long and the goddamned humidity destroyed it. All a tangle, large and static, coated with sweat. I was laying under a tree and reading near the dog beach in Lake Henry and behind me, on the sidewalk, families walked and laughed and took pictures and soon they'd have to drive back to New York or wherever they came from and they'd think about this day, every so often, for years to come. And there I was, Unremarkably lost in the background. I had been to the Tiki Bar an hour or so before and, coupled with old Hem and the sun and the tree and the lake, was paradisically rum drunk and, thoughtlessly in that moment, in love.

Summer, July. Shamefully unemployed, but you can't fight the beauty of moments. Well, I can't. The spirit alive and singing in a workless and beautiful day, in a bottle of wine, in a good sandwich, in love. I had been working my way through "The Sun Also Rises" and I understood the criticism it received, but those critics weren't me and they weren't under a tree, rum drunk in July on the shore of Lake Henry. The book was for me and me alone. Jake Barnes, though tragically dickless, was me. It would be a couple years yet before I understood exactly how accurate it was, but we were as though brothers then. 

I checked my phone. Service came and went in Lake Henry. There were no messages, or at the least none that had come through yet. I'd lay in the day for a while and swing back up to the bar maybe as evening settled. In my bag next to me I kept a half box of wine and a notebook, rape whistle, pens, chapstick, two yo-yos, and a phone charger. I was prepared to kill time. 

I closed the summer degraded book and put it in my bag. Took a drink of the wine. Stared out at the lake, wide and filled even at that moment with a thousand summers, and got up. The sidewalk was crowded and the beach was crowded. There was something about observing it all, sliding through it all, that made me feel alive and warm and not a part of anything. Outside of it all and refreshed. Meandering through the summer crowds was a smoke break and though I was less than a ghost to them, I loved them each and all for being a part of my moment, my summer, my love.

My bag tapped light on my ass, heavy with wine, as I walked and through sunglasses I kept my look stolid but my eyes wandered to each person. To each held hand. To each person behind a camera, setting a timer. I captured them all and walked on.

The day goes on. I walk. I drink. I write a bit and as evening settles I go to the bar again and sit by a fire and drink more rum and I think to myself how beautiful the world is and I wonder how I could ever be sad and now

in February

I hold on to that thought, years dead. 

July. My love.

Waiting for the Pizza

There comes a moment in ash when you have to decide if the fire is out. If the trees may catch again, if you can start sweeping this mess, if you can reclaim. If the world is still there and if you belong or want to belong in it. 

I ordered a pizza and poured another glass of wine and watched television with Elle. I thought I was catching a stomach bug and I had spent half of my day off working and not writing and not painting and not quite awake. I laid my head on her chest and she kissed the top of it and I thought of all the things I wanted to do and of all the same things I wouldn't do. I was tired and worn from the job and afraid of each new morning and I was already regretting the fucking garbage I was about to eat but was too hungry and tired to get to the store to buy something I actually needed. 

I did miss the chaos. The destruction. I thought about it often. I thought I belonged there. In the mess. It was me and I was it. 

Elles heartbeat sometimes was irregular but now I could feel and hear it inside of her and it kept time and casually rolled on and on and I thought "Me too." 

"How d'you feel?" she asked.

"Hungry. Agitated."

"I'm sorry, love." She ran her fingers through my short and ever thinning hair and I thought it seemed as though my entire being fought the idea that I could let myself be happy. "Yeah, that sounds like me," I thought.

Cartoon on the television and I kept thinking about a story I had been working on a year before but had apparently dropped after two hundred odd pages. The characters were driving, last I left them, and they never came back and sometimes that happens to people. I thought maybe I had finished it and that was okay with me. 

I thought I might shit myself. 

Hoped the pizza would help that. Doubted it.

Elle laughed at the television and when she did, her arm tightened around me and I wondered again if I could just let myself be. Happy, content, whatever.

I would never be successful. I would never be wealthy. I would never be respected as some sort of creator, or person, and that was all fine. 

I would never be truly, actually, blindly happy or connected, or a part of it all and that used to worry me, when I was younger, but now not at all and that made me worry. I had become detached. I had become a face to the people around me and nothing more. I saw shapes of people and heard their murmurs and watched their patterns and I stood in the center of it all and I was not them. I was no one and nothing and that, that was fine.

I am not a bird, fish, tree, or human.

I orbit and observe and gather their charitable smiles and laughs and stories and treasure their distance and dreams and complete inability to see it all for what it is.

I stand on the sidelines and watch and I have no desire.

The doorbell rings and I get up and get the pizza. Tip the guy a couple of bucks and set the food down and Elle gets plates and paper towels and we eat and watch television and with a large red X I'll soon be able to cross this day off and then on to the next.

I eat too much food and my stomach hurts. 

Elle runs her fingers slow and soft over it. 

I am afraid of each new morning and that stopped mattering a long time ago.

A Moment in Morning

I was asleep for a year and when I woke I had fallen into a new existence. The day ahead, the house around, the girl next to. My hands were caked in paint and callused from the guitar strings. My throat was dried from singing and drinking and in the dark of the bare bedroom, in the company of her, I inhaled and this was the May morning, this cold and dark Friday in January, this. The breath came easy and welcomed. The day, though I'd bitch, was worth finishing. I had known it was coming, and sometimes I must have almost forgotten that. 

Crawl out of bed in the blue dawn and glance back at the hint of shoulder under the comforter, note the cups marked with the residue of chianti on the dresser and the soft carpet under my feet. Piss in the "en suite". Pull open the bedroom door to the house I didn't deserve, but had somehow acquired, to the day I didn't deserve, but had somehow found myself rutted in. It was as stuck with me as I was with it. Into the kitchen where the coffee had brewed a half hour before. 

Coffee. Put together a breakfast and while the bacon and eggs cooked, I would shower.

Standing in the shower and trying to remember how I got here.

I remember the descent. The crash. Bottom. Then nothing.   

Now I wake. Now I shamble through my large and empty house. Now I kiss the girl goodbye and now I know. Yes.

Now I know it will get better.

It had to, and it did.