The new year is here. “Let’s go to the lake.” Nothing has exactly changed much, the gas prices went up. It’s slightly cold, the air is modern, aggressive. 2009 was such a strange year, rife with shadows and long tear drops over love and loss. I had hoped to not lose anyone so soon…but it happened and death has taken yet again.
The other night: there was a bluemoon. I got hacked to pieces by a machete, and the sparks caught my knuckles as they fell one by one into the fire. I thought I was going to die. I met some friends, we had a firecracker and it blew up, but not before we settled within the champagne; the watery guitar washing through the grape-colored space between millions of conversations.
When we got home, I fell asleep on the bed. My head was all full of winding roads, ticket punchers wearing gray 3-piece suits, a book of birds, and plastic pain. For a mere moment, the side of me that is Night, took over. I was scared and the white reverb in my chest sunk deeper into the abyss. The glow of my thoughts was black and cold, yet secretly smoldering, just warm enough to keep company. I walked back into the fire, and it mysteriously consumed me until I wept. It wasn’t until the bones in my neck cracked and turned, that I realized how majestic the cold orange of dawn could truly be.
I woke up on new year’s morning and touched the body next to mine, it was quite warm and very unconscious. Sitting up, I became attracted to the sounds coming from the kitchen. The cats were moving around, looking for something. The dog was outside, crying in the splinters of an early sunrise. The crystalline drops of dust were just barely settling on the antique keys of a broken piano. I let the dog in and she moved past me clicking upon the wooden floor and into the bedroom, where her master lie, sleeping off the grim darkness.
I wandered the house looking for those ridiculous poetry magnets that belonged solely on the cold squares of refrigerators. But I couldn’t find them. The mossy memories of sleep were being shoved off onto my real-life thoughts, my conscious thoughts. They layered in a nice pattern and in no way disfigured the tendrils of other thoughts coming to and fro in the early morning quietude.
As the time slowly locked onto their world, they woke up. We had brunch and recounted the night before. I caught myself dishing out apologies for whatever reason, we do after all, adorable things to each other in these such short lifetimes of experience. It was a fine afternoon, nonetheless. Throughout the rest of the day, we watched films. It was probably at this time, that the funeral arrangements were being made, while I lay upon the couch wishing for what I could not have.
Her final moments were among many of those sacred privities unknown to the living…I can only try to imagine the fright and the flight, if such things truly exist. Alas, there she is, somewhere in the colossal ether of a billion twinkling galaxies, swimming amongst the rest of our futures, singing through the dark glass that separates our reality from theirs. The cold and jagged claws of gravity can do no more harm to her…
And it’s good, it’s all going to be ok from now on.
