It’s snowing. Just walked to the store and bought two pints of Ben and Jerry’s. Can’t afford to buy food at work tomorrow, have to bring a bananna. And the rent check is going to bounce.
I am too much in love with this reality.
I am in love with its qualities of love, words, and music. Those are the beautiful features on its face. Those are its seductions.
And i keep writing, trying to convey this, but it’s not entirely communicable. So i don’t want to think about a goal reached by how well i write. I want to put weight on the goal reached within the act of writing. What it represents for me to be writing this down and sharing it.
maybe you will find my honesty in that.
Because I want to be hopelessly honest to everyone.
The quiet was so perfect that the hood of my parka made too much noise against my ears and I took it off to listen to the snow—the snow, sleeping everywhere, lying pure and undisturbed. I had no idea it snowed until I left the house, because all evening I was studying Lucas. Just a boy. Actually, he’s just a boy like everyday comes just the sun. And I’ve not been studying the boy himself, directly—I’ve not even seen a pic. But I have been through all 135, or so, of his diary entries, and it’s nice there’s been no pic. It has allowed me a truer vision of his beauty than I could have had if I had seen his face.
To call him a boy is not fair for indeed he is a man, and one who has achieved much greater progress in his nineteen years than I in forty-four. Perhaps that’s why I read him. And wait. For more. Maybe I use him to feed my silly fantasies of what could have been, my obsession with the past. I doggedly evaded the passions of my own youth like a prisoner of war tunneling out of a stalag. I linger here, now long past the end of my escape, and I listen for antediluvian echoes from the experiences I abandoned, and I cling to them as if to delay their loss and I imagine what passion there might have been had I not fled…
The echoes diminish, and soon not even a nostalgic link is left to tether the loss, and I hurtle into empty silence.
When the quiet makes me panicky, one such as Lucas calms my angst. I don’t know why but it seems helpful to know that somewhere, one who is perhaps like I might have been, is riding out the full passion of his youth in all its sweet fury and rage. I ran away when my turn came, so now, in the cold, dark dead of night, it is vicarious comfort to know that someone is accepting the full embrace of passion’s precious and terrible gifts.
Happy birthday.