Three Songs

A crash landing amongst cedar trees and soft paddling turtles.

The distance to whimsy has never been further.

There are no dreams to dream of loves long past. Not when the crash landing was planned.

You don’t end up halfway round the world by accident. Or at least, I haven’t. This has been a long crafted design. One that saw closer threat of never being realized than the actuality of it.

I name the siren “Hope” and follow her song over the horizon. Wondering if I had misheard “Destiny” instead of “Danger.” I’m left with the suspicion that she is all three.

Strange Sands

Love is a sideways emotion in a life where I’ve tried to stay vertical. 

But now I’m lying diagonally— trying to fill the space where our bodies would meet— and I can’t bear the thought of standing anymore. 

Time slipped away slow when my eyes were on you. Now you’re gone. And the sand in the hour glass wants to escape along with you. 

Each grain is a memory I’ll forget with its exit.  And yet the cells of my body will echo our history in the cosmic deep. Each speck is a star waiting to be reborn. 

I’ll stay sideways— no need to be reborn before the ether echoes. 

Before stranger sands beckon. 

Disney Moments

Do you know the dramatic scenes in romance movies where the protagonist barrels through a rainstorm to sweep their love interest off their feet and twirl them around as they lose themselves in each other's embrace? It turns out that is just movie magic.

It's November of 2012 when you fly into Logan international airport in Boston, five days after Hurricane Sandy shut down most of the East Coast. You've got a million and one food allergies, but the unholy trio of gluten, corn, and dairy means you haven't had anything to eat in eight hours, and the late arrival at Grand Central station means nothing is open. The thirty minutes the plane spent circling the runway because of weather conditions led to you missing your train to Worcester and tacked on another hour to your increasingly hangry, anxious existence. You try not to fall into a sour mood, but it's hard as you look around at the deserted train station. This isn't what you expected from your first romantic journey. You're less Sir Gwain, and more Sir Sit Your Ass Down.

You're holding tight to the nerves because of the make or break phone call a month earlier where your girlfriend demands an action out of you- either you visit or it is over. You're a lovesick, stubborn teenager with little two friends, so you book a ticket within twenty-four hours (after a tense, awkward argument with your parents who don't want you to fly across the country).

You board the train for a fifty-mile journey and try to relax into the wheels' alternating clicks and klaks on the rails. The windows show you foreign darkness, and all you can do is spare some furtive glances around a sparse train car.

You arrive at a closing station in Worcester, and the moment you step outside, howling winds and the first snowfall of the year greet you. Your cheap red snow jacket barely holds your warmth in, and the less said about your Vans, the better.  

The number for the taxi is wrong, and your girlfriend can't find the right one. The tips of your fingers are already numb, and the rest of your one hundred and twenty-five-pound frame isn't far behind.She takes a while to find it. The snow keeps falling.

You finally get in contact with a taxi, and with glacial speed, a classic yellow cab pulls up.

A thick Worcester accent greets you. The cabbie speaks like he's buttering a roll with sardine paste. The cab manages to hit every pothole in the iced-over road. The city itself is a pothole.

The cabbie, not knowing the university, drops you off at the business administration building. Not knowing any better or having the confidence to suggest anything else,  you get out.

The winds are back to greet you as you spot a couple of students scampering through the fresh snow.

Your girlfriend doesn't know where the business building is, and each gust of wind is lowering your patience for standing outside.

You didn't want to arrive with the sourpuss attitude and frozen fingers. Isn't love a great adventure where it proves to overpower minor details like Mother Nature?

But there you are. Tired from the flight, hungry, cold, and lost on a campus you never expected to step foot on. Hell, you're in a state you never even wanted to visit. But you're there.

Your girlfriend leaves her dorm to come and find you- you half-listen to her on the phone as you scan the campus, focusing on hearing her without it.

And suddenly, there she is. Clad in black leggings, a puffy coat, and a white knitted hat. The first girl you've ever loved. The light catches her as snowflakes collect on the hat. She's staring straight ahead- no idea you're a hundred yards to her left. You take off like the Flash. You've never run so fast in your life. She turns when you're three strides away just in time for her to jump into your arms as you scoop her up. You twirl around, both spending a thousand frantic kisses, and the snow keeps gently falling over you. This is your Disney moment. Everything love is supposed to be, right?

Too bad it's not enough. You break your embrace to ask to get inside. You still can't feel your toes.

Her friends blitz you with a million questions and greeting- the boyfriend from back home is finally here! Eventually, they notice your girlfriend is bouncing up and down, imitating a Golden Retriever, and they take their cue to leave.

You finally get a moment together- one that you've waited months for. Christmas lights fill the room. It's a warm, golden glow that greets you.

Your mutual hunger, affection, anxiety, lust, and frightening love boils over as you pounce on each other.

You forget how stubborn leggings can be. The case of walking pneumonia means it's back to rubber protection with the birth control subdued by the infection. All of this is running through your head- until you sink into the moment and forget it all for the real Hollywood film moment of soft limbs holding onto each other- believing there might be a bigger story to this than the abbreviated short it'll turn into.

Her long cinnamon brown hair holds a scent you've waited to breathe in for ages.

You want this to work- you want yourself to want it to work. But you hate this place. You squeeze her as tight as you can- hoping to close the distance between the life paths you're both walking down. But it doesn't work like that.

You dream of calling upon the synchronicities of the universe to tie your lives together in a neat bow. To deliver yourself from the work of personal progression and hang it all up for a nice and neat relationship.

But you can't beat the odds when you know deep down you don't even want to try.

Your Dr.Jekyll of romantic commitment butts up against your Mr. Hyde of personal freedom. You try to squash one in hopes of preserving the other. It doesn't work. They're both apart of you. And at eighteen years old- there's not a hope in the world that you've learned how to manage a peaceful co-existence between them.

Young love is a bright, wonderful, wild, dark, cruel, confusing, sweet mishmash. I was terrified by the line that you'll never experience anything like your first love for years after. It was terrifying because I believed that I'd never experience that level of intimacy again.

The whispered confessions trickle like molasses from virgin lips.

I was afraid that I would never have another Disney moment- and that I tainted my one with the snow. I felt that I had sullied what could have been a pure moment with my sour attitude. As I've grown, I've learned to love that moment for how human it is.

That moment showcased the extraordinary, bright, and terrible range of human emotions as love (desire) enveloped me even as annoyance dominated my mind. We are not revised works- we are continuous first drafts in a world that believes in finished ones.

Knots

A flickering candle tossed shadows across the back of your van. The drum of steady rain played over our heads as we laid together in your bed. Soft songs filled the air, and menstrual blood sat in the sink.

I drank apple juice for the first time in years as we stood at an angle. The street slanted to collect rain along the curbs. 

Off-balance together. 

We weren't in a movie scene, but you told me I spoke like a character from one. Or that I belonged in fiction because people like me don't exist in reality. 

Your stomach started to cramp from an onrushing UTI. Your distaste of water and close relationship with antibiotics made this a regular occurrence. 

You spoke of adventure as a cure for the darkness inside you. That somehow you could part from it as you left this continent for another.  

Except you live as a rope—woven together with strands of sorrow that you refuse to let go. Worried you'll lose the identity you've so carefully created—even as it brings you pain. 

You told me that real art requires suffering. As if that justified the self-inflicted torture you endure as you let your past loom over you. 

I wonder who you would be without that Spector hanging over your shoulder.

We laid naked together—testing the limits of imagination as we both spoke of the future. I think we might each live as rope, but you can't tie a knot together with someone if your strands are on the verge of breaking. 

We held each other— until your daily attack on memories of loves come and gone, as though you might destroy and replace them with ones of you. That somehow there's only a finite amount of love in the world, and if I had ever cared for anyone before you, they were a threat. 

It was as if I should have only existed in the moments I experienced together with you. That I couldn't even speak of the last twenty-five years of life for fear of your anger towards anyone you had to share me with. You were jealous of the ghosts of people that no longer exist. Who I was with them, just as they were with me, are long gone. 

I told you that I was here in the moment with you—but you selfishly wanted the whole story and not this chapter onwards. 

I wanted to live in that candlelit moment. With heavy rain, ethereal guitar, and warm skin pressed against me. I wanted to dream of distant adventures and fill with hope instead of fear. 

But shadows lived in between us. The flickers of past loves and harsh words peeking through. The silence settled, heavy weight upon our affection—showing the strain between creative liberation and production of fear. 

That cramped bed saw bent toes and a crooked heart. It bothers me that you didn't think to lay in the other direction, where forgiveness was.