Waxing Poetsophical, or Another Missive That Will Never Grace Your Ears.

So I watched that sinkhole of a movie ‘Solaris‘, and while I found it wooden and stilted and limping under its own weight, upon reflection I see the parallel between the movement of the film and the way one feels after a love that is lost but achingly unforgotten.

I was okay until Clooney’s character uttered these lines:

I tried to find the rhythm of the world where I used to live. I followed the current. I was silent, attentive, I made a conscious effort to smile, nod, stand, and perform the millions of gestures that constitute life on earth. I studied these gestures until they became reflexes again. But I was haunted by the idea that I remembered her wrong, and somehow I was wrong about everything.

That little batch of sentences, well hey, they reached cleanly up under my ribcage and violently manhandled everything there. I forget these sore spots sometimes. Like any other injury, we find ways for the rest of the system to compensate; a severely bruised, wanting heart is no different. Like any other tether, once you stop straining against it or clawing yourself bloody on it, you can find plenty to do within your limits if you try hard enough. Straining fatigues; staying busy…well, it keeps you busy, if nothing else.

There are some days when I think of you and it is barely a blip on the radar. You’re in my brain and *poof*, you’re gone, replaced by chemistry or cooking dinner or a snippet of prose or the next day’s scheduling of events.

Then, at other times, the most ridiculous chain of thoughts (rain today, I like rain, galoshes would be fun, like duck feet, my family always refers to the Navy boys as ‘ducks’, I told Him this and laughed, He bought a teeshirt with the biggest goofy duck imaginable on it just to one-up me) links up and leads to you so quickly and forcefully that I scarcely recall how I got there. You are as stubborn in my thoughtspace as you are in the flesh; on these days I cannot shake you out of there no matter how hard I try.

And I know –I know like I have two arms and two legs is the degree to which I know– that at those times you are moving through your day, thinking of me as well. When you send out your tendril of thought and I send out mine and they meet somewhere in the middle, they grasp at one another, tangling and refusing to unsnare.

Your absence makes life hellish; your presence in my head makes it even moreso. I wonder if I’ll ever be able to let this go. Sometimes, quite like coward, I wish you’d give me reason to.

There are men that absolutely long to be loved as I have loved you, there are women who spend their whole lives in search of ten minutes’-worth of the kind of passion you unleashed on me. There’s scads of evidence to prove that supposition: Volumes and volumes of poetry and lyrics and notes and prose have been put down by hand after hand as far back as our recollection of literate time will stretch….and that’s just the segment of the population that have taken a running stab at capturing it. Lucky, tortured beings to have known it.

I told a friend the other day, because he is cut of the same cloth of running headlong into impassioned stupidity as I, “Sad songs are my crackrock.” My works are always close at hand, and if they’re not, I scavenge for a substitute: I put my own voice to them. It’s just not enough to let them keen away in your soul.

You know, it came to me the other day out of the clear blue; it came like all good answers do, cleanly and without beckon, despite my having thought and thought and thought on it through all these years and dragging it behind me over all the miles like a ninety-pound suitcase on a ten-pound test line (cutting into my hands all the while, and why oh why haven’t I cared? because I care(d) that’s why).

Like all good answers, it was impossibly simple and direct, and here it is:

I spent time today just missing you with everything I had. Funny thing is, I never feel like these moments are wasted ones. Me, the Great And Ardent Multi-Tasker.

Despite the fact that we shun one another, I still miss you., am still your friend (sans strings, stings, or expectations). Remember that, because you just may need a friend one day, though you’ve grown so accustomed to not having them, so settled in distrust.

You take care, you hear?

I’m so tired of being here / suppressed by all my childish fears / and if you have to leave / I wish that you would just leave / ’cause your presence still lingers here / and it won’t leave me alone

these wounds won’t seem to heal / this pain is just too real / there’s just too much that time cannot erase

when you cried I’d wipe away all of your tears / when you’d scream I’d fight away all of your fears / and I held your hand through all of these years / but you still have all of me

you used to captivate me / by your resonating light / now I’m bound by the life you left behind / your face it haunts my once pleasant dreams / your voice it chased away all the sanity in me

these wounds won’t seem to heal / this pain is just too real / there’s just too much that time cannot erase

when you cried I’d wipe away all of your tears / when you’d scream I’d fight away all of your fears / I held your hand through all of these years / but you still have all of me

I’ve tried so hard to tell myself that you’re gone / but though you’re still with me / I’ve been alone all along

when you cried I’d wipe away all of your tears / when you’d scream I’d fight away all of your fears / I held your hand through all of these years / but you still have / all of me

*It’s the piano, the fucking piano. I can never sit down at one anymore without remembering us, side by side, fingers sidling up to one another and pushing, reluctant, away. All the music, inside and out, you fucker. You absolute fucker.