Future Unclear, Ask Again Later
There are three songs on my wedding song list. Soon to be four. I don’t need any spectacular ivory napkins at .80 cents each. I don’t need a big hall that I don’t know enough people to fill.
I need a place and a time and someone to stand there with.
Things are very weird in their stillness, a stillness I am just beginning to sense is flaking away with the onset of autumn. I hate winter with a fear and fury that is only broken by the holidays and rest that stud its one long black night with light
This year I am all about autumn. I am all about a dark sky. Yellow leaves. Curling up. There’s wind pushing the trees slightly to the left. Feels like the heavens have opened their vents. The moon’s position in the sky. Things waning, calming down. Feeling like there’s been a good day’s work and things coming to harvest for future projects. The heat leaving my fevered head. Realizations. Hanging up our coats and pulling out our boots and gloves. Taking things in off the line. Re-assessing possibilities and redrawing boundaries.
I still want to wake up tangled in his sheets. French press coffee. Shop at Crate and Barrel and find the tethers that keep me bound to where I am, what I am, how I am suddenly tied to new buoys dipping and hiccuping further out into the boundless sea. I am not kidding myself, now, except of course for the fact that there’s still a hope, now smaller and manageable in pocket-size, that I feel something that can or would be reciprocated. I can’t stop that, though, no more than I can stop breathing.
I can just stop expecting so explicitly. I can tamp it down. I can stop parsing language. Damning the universe, counting minutes, checking websites, tapping at the door of a greater and greater obsession. I know what’s on the other side now. Just a big drop-off and no big cushion at the bottom. I can mind it so it doesn’t get out of proportion. I can force my eyes’ gaze into his, into the face of the thing I so desire, to look at it for truth and not for the gloss of fantasy. I can ignore the pain and loneliness I feel in his heart in the light of a universe that is in pain and craving company. I can frame it just so and stop blushing in his presence. I can grow up.
But…what are the actual advantages of that? No friendship, no outlet, no goal. Another thing behind lock and key?
No. This is autumn and nothing has to be so. This is the season of witchcraft and preparing for true hibernation. So we must play and gather those last rosebuds and say what we mean and tear up the sacred ground even if we have to make recompense by playing the music of absolution and regret twenty-four hours for as long as the teflon tents poke up into an ambivalent and equitable sky.
