#310

 How 'bout some memories? Why not, right? 

*

Couple beers in and I'm spinning off a yarn, threaded silver with witticism. My audience--at the time, my girlfriend and my best friend--are laughing hard enough to cry and gasp, but I do not relent for even a second--the sight spurs me. I take it up a notch. At the time, under the prevailing conditions, this requires zero effort. Pausing briefly only to swig from my dark brown bottle of stout, I lean forward, pull faces, gesture ridiculously. Keeping up the patter, lighting up a cigarette. Their faces are red, they lean back in their chairs to clear the way for breath to reenter their lungs as it may, they beg me to stop between gales of laughter, but I have a goal in mind, a shining line to kill it with, and there is no deterring me. It's all worth it when I get there. Worth it in every sense, for everyone, most of all me, and I relish in it, the power of being able to sustain the verbal dervish that eludes me so completely when sober. 

By the time I'm five beers in, I don't say much. Eight beers in, done talking for the night. Just sit there, drunk. Just sit, while they talk incomprehensibly around me, my ears choked with thoughts made of dark fire, thoughts overburdened with incommunicable meaning. We've had our fun. Now it's dark. And it will get darker, each time, until the end of the line, until life heaves itself into a new configuration for all of us.

Now, these days, can't remember a word of what I said. Dunno what even the hell I was talking about. My best friend hasn't reached out or answered my attempts at contact in over ten years. My ex-girlfriend is even more reclusive than I am; an accomplishment that lives closer to the humorless truth involved in the jokes I tell about myself--hermit, shut-in, non-participant in society. Am I to blame for this state of affairs? Largely, perhaps entirely.

Was it really worth it, all of it, the nights around that wooden table laden with poisons, gritty with ash? All that came of that rough and drunken circle? Though I couldn't defend it materially, I have to believe that it is so. There is no other choice in life.

*

Smoking a cigarette late, late at night by my door, on the tiny wooden platform up the slippery wooden steps. The lower floor and basement of the house behind me is unoccupied; no one uses the front door. I use the back, which opens on a stairway up the second floor, where I live alone. Worn down from work, eyes stinging from too much reading and too little sleeping, hunched over beneath the weight of my leather jacket, I reflect that I have possibly never been as lonely. The feeling makes me smile. The realization makes me savor the thought of it, the suffering in it I have always been more or less immune to in the past. I have changed, I realize. I have become more human.

*

A friend and I had breakfast at the nicest diner in town and went down to the river to talk. We choose a couple bridges to suspend ourselves over the water on, let it pull itself and everything that can settle on its tension beneath us. We go down to the shoreline and balance on the mossy stones. I take my shoes and socks off and wade in till the water rises to the middle of my calves, the current lazy, the water almost as warm as my skin, the minnows nibbling, the sun searing down like a laser and the cool swooping in like a savior with the patchy clouds.

We talked about her memories of her trip around the world. She told me about roaming around Australia, about getting by in Russia. A boy she fucked in Barcelona, a sweetness that turned dangerous and had to be escaped. This was a pattern with her, the sweet, sensible masks that boys she fell for disposed of down the line. She told me about some dreams she had in Japan, a psychic she saw in Tokyo, how she came to realize reincarnation was real, remembered some of her past lives. A time when she was her sister's mother. 

She is dead, now. May her next life break the circle. May our lives all break the circle. Or not. Whatever the will of God may be. May we see one another again, beyond this strange and shadowed veil. If it is not to be, may she find the peace and satisfaction that so often eluded her in her body's time scrambling on the surface of the earth.

*

More like this soon? Maybe something completely different?

Only! Time! Will! Tell!

--JL