“Peggy Sue’s still hung up on Treble Without A Cause.”
The first time I saw that series of looping grooves in your belly, I wasn’t horrified or disgusted.
Not at all.
My first instinct was to want to put my fingertips to them and draw out all the hurt and the suffering that they surely represented. I think I knew then –as infuriating and annoying as you could be, even on that first night– that I would end up loving you like nobody else.
I went to Memphis last weekend…there’s no trace of the places where we were ‘us’; everything’s been either boarded up or altered beyond all recognition. It left me soul-winded to learn this.
Yeah, everything’s changed.
Except the park. You remember ~ the night before I married him you pulled the car up alongside that park –locking the doors, turning it off– and asked me to run away with you.
“Everything,” you said, “It will cost me my family, my career, everything, but I don’t care.”
Sometimes I wonder if I’d have answered differently, not been so fearful of the havoc you’d wreak on me, if you’d have just said “I love you” somewhere in the middle of all that beseeching. Three words to break the house.
I mean, I knew you loved me, but the fact that you were either too stubborn or too prideful (or too both) to be just vulnerable enough to tell me…well, it was far too unsettling a thing to allow me to hitch up my boots and holler, “Let’s go!!!”
Someday you will gather to the courage to contact me again…know that I will receive you warmly when you finally do.
I hope the knowledge of that comforts you.
I miss you so, so much.
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