These dreams dropped into real-time and took root;
So taken, as they were, with unreality turning tricks to see the morning come.
And me?
Here I am, a plaintiff in a sea of stories treading water to stay afloat:
Finding current in a song,
Strong and Ready,
Steady as I cook a fix;
Sturdy with conviction as I learn to WRITE in FLIGHT.
To travel down a bustling city sidewalk and hear church bells is to be pulled into the past; As if to say, “This time is GODLESS, but at least we have each other.”
I frequent the same coffee shop every morning on my way to work. This addiction means I’ve developed a rapport with the staff, particularly a young kid from Mexico City who has an earnest sweetness to him. This morning, the morning after Father’s Day, he asked me “Did you call your Dad this weekend?” I replied, with an uncomfortable chuckle, “Uh huh, no. I didn’t. My Dad’s dead,” as I scurried to the other end of the bar and away from the eager customer behind me, jonesing for java on a Monday morn. When I turned the same question on him he told me he didn’t know his father. Never did.
I bid him good day, and walked out to my car. Sliding into the driver seat of the VW my Dad posthumously purchased for me, I took a moment. I set my latte down, tossed my piece of illicit crumb cake onto the passneger seat, and rummaged for a CD from the glove compartment to realign my professional comportment. Fish, fish fish and found it–Anais Mitchell’s Young Man in America.
I forwarded through to Track 6, “He Did,” which accompanies this post in video form despite it delivering no video (not my preference, but it’ll do the job in a pinch). I default to music in times of (let’s say) stress without a second thought, as compulsory as an irregular heartbeat, because music makes memory move and marks moments; it heals through submersion since feelings felt fully are the ones that will eventually form a scab. While it probably made other customers uncomfortable, the exchange with my beloved barrista reminded me that while the void is very deep, still, in spite of passing years, at least there is a hole to fill. A path to find. A row to hoe. And an empty page to fill. It reminded me of how it feels to be my father’s daughter, alive like this.
For if nothing else, I am my father’s daughter.
We are consumed by a treasure hunt of unparalleled proportions on an island that has no name. This is the search for meaning, the journey towards a definition. This is life. The little things, the tragic things.
The sticker on the corner of a medicine cabinet mirror, left there by the daughter of a previous occupant and now a part of your morning narrative. The glasses worn by a woman of Italian heritage, removed from the bridge of her nose by death and sold for a pittance from her garage, now worn proudly by a young man more than half her age to that indie show headlined by that band (you know, the one with the lithe bearded gent at the helm) in a small basement around the corner from a former firehouse. The piano, a wedding present to that bride who secretly despised her groom, now spreading the gospel of tolerance and devotion to hundreds of bodies placed piously in their pews.
These are lives overlapping. The past marking the present as it gets passed by for the future. Nothing without meaning, even if the words have not been said and understood. Every anomaly not really out of place, but merely misunderstood. Layers are interwoven atop foundations poured by people framed in frozen photographs hidden in a drawer. Or maybe, if they’re lucky, gathering dust near the edge of a nightstand. Still remembered, still present.
This is history. Not an archaic subject caked in dust and mummified by dates to be memorized, unanalyzed. History is the story of people chasing dreams, or of dreams chasing people; of stickers, glasses, and pianos; of ephemera, sights and sounds.
History is meaningful. History is you and me, and all the other things I see. History Is.
I speak, but say nothing. Noted for a skill I do not have but just appear to possess. A prize of false perception; a quill taken and held high. As high as those walls there in the distance, the ones just beyond the glenn. The one in which the zephyr sits so solemn in its ghostly dock, fully covered by the Spanish moss dripping, dropping in its gravity down into its death.
The fault? Oh Yes, that was mine. Wrought with good intentions, I just didn’t keep the time. I stalked the ground for seven big, brown years and found the circle comforting. No fear of losing compass, no dread from the unknown. Just the constant left-bound motion of a path so tried and true. A ticking, a tocking, an ever-present hum of deadlock finding favor in the absence of a choice.
I will go where I will go. Nonsense pulling triggers where safeties were left unlatched. A cascade of destinations just beyond those walls. A cacophony of options too numerous to understand. Easy enough to find, harder to enjoy. With that whisper of decision upon the tongue tip, trapped in execution.
A fatal pause. Another lap around.
Growing up, my room was directly adjacent to the family room in our sprawling single-story Southern California ranch home. Noises traveled through doorways and lingered in the halls of this old house, as did its people. Each night with such suburban regularity the noise of the nightly news watched by my mother in her kitchen cove floated by the feature film on which my father had paused, although he never stayed on any one image long. He reclining on the couch his hard work had purchased, feet on the Ethan Allen coffee table and arm raised high over his head as his suspended hand aimed the t.v. remote towards the cable box with nonchalant purpose.
Me, I was safe inside four walls, two windows and one door as the world revolved around itself outside, storming chaos as it paved its paths and picked its sides. But I knew nothing of this fury yet, even as I wrote nothings in a moleskin that seemed so urgent and so true. No, the things I knew then followed the floorboards of that grey-blue house set just before the foothills where my bare feet navigated each grain of wood as I summoned the courage to find my stride. With each passing awkward year I wobbled less, noticed more. And while I know not the name of he who put those windows in those walls, I know the man who washed them clear of soot and soil to free his daughter from the task. From that clarity came words: words on paper; words that broke down letters to build stairwells; words that filled apartments with holograms and hopes; words that explained my station to those not unto myself.
Which is to say…if we are each a product of our environment, then I was packaged well. Kept safe and warm with only surface cracks sustained in shipping. So now I stop, I sit to recall the space that gave me words; to remember the rattle of its heater and the groans of its hinges, and capture this memory in characters. Using words to keep it real, architecture forming verse that reminds me of the people inside even if they roam its halls no more. Yes, here I stop…
Death creates a sense of manic urgency when it invades, when cemeteries cease to be abstractions and become home to ones you love. Every twitch of sinew is weighted with importance. Waste not, regret not for tomorrow is uncertain; It is No longer guaranteed.
This makes you a martyr fallen on the blade of memory. But only you will know and this is the cross that you will bear. To want so desperately to make your name, but stay exactly as you were when he last saw you should he be fumbling in the dark to find his way back home.
This is your darkest secret. It is the steam that holds the air and surrounds you. Because an “I” has meaning only where a “Thou” is granted; where there is no Alter an Ego cannot be.
She realized would never touch the ivory on her mother’s piano again. It, as with all she had known, was fracturing to other places. It had left its place beside the hearth. Far from her reach, Foreign to her sight. Washed clean free of provenance to dwell in a home with no mind for such things. No longer a gift from her father, who now laid snugly in the ground. No longer there to gather the family ’round. Another memory gone.
Now just another piece of furniture on which to place a drink.
Power is curious. Unless continually moving, like a rolling stone, its blood coagulates and forms a crust through which its captive can see but not do, feel but not find.
When Power stagnates, it feeds off the flaneurs, we the ones who are continually underfoot. Ever moving, ever changing what we are and what’s around us, Power watches us until the time is right. Then, swiftly, it descends, jaw clenched tight in anticipation. Hoping. Wanting to transmute to look like us, be like us, obliterate us in physical form.
But to no avail. Because we are the makers of meaning; we are that hallow reference on your tongue; we are the content on a continent flooded with vacancies.
We ARE what it is NOT.
Nostos Algos 