blah blah, blah blah, blah. Can you tell Napster has stolen my muse?
The boy—a high school classmate, one of many I had loved, secretly—was nothing like the man who appeared at the office door. With a smirk, in a time now passed, the boy did dance atop life's contradictions, back in 1976 when he had not yet succumbed to them. He was handsome, as youth is always, when we were seventeen. He was not close to me—but, then, no one was—when I was seventeen.
Then slowly, beneath the years, I began to recognize the remnants of the youthful face and brown eyes which once looked upon my adolescent panic with kind understanding; a thing rarely revealed to me in high school by another boy. And seldom since then—by anyone. It is a precious memory, and I wish I could just keep it as a memory; I wish my whole life was just a memory. Avoid it all, and still keep it. There are advantages to this: He stays beautiful, and I stay young. We keep only the encounters of compassion, discarding moments when fear or injury prevailed. And I don't need to deal with... now.
now. Now I must go to work, at a detox, where this innocent of my past has resurfaced—scared, battered, and no longer young.
It is an apparition of myself.
|
|
|
|
updated |