I can still recall your face…
Like the distant memory of a scent, it’s not so much the sight of you that sticks out in my mind, but the feeling you evoked. I remember watching you. You were the first subject I felt compelled to study, the first time I remember genuinely wanting to learn. To take you home and open you on my bed, feel my way through your pages and search for the deeper meaning hidden in your words. Find what no one else took time to see. I committed you to memory. Religion and heaven seemed so juvenile until you smiled, then churches and moral sacrifices all made sense, no life deserved to be void of such light. Pastors preached and their verses held no weight compared to the gospel of your voice, a gravity so real that I couldn’t find the strength to lift myself off your sacred ground.
But…
I was too young to know, at that point, the fine line between heaven and hell. Too drunk on you to realize the reality of being sober, that cold and lonely feeling of falling with nothing to grab onto, of crashing into a memory of yourself. A you that you forgot about. I remember watching you as the years passed. As your songs became played out and fresh bursts of your flavor grew bored with tasting ripe. I watched the angels that lived in your eyes turn into abusive drunks and I saw the weeds stretch and spiral up the pillars of your heavenly gates. I suppose even heaven can grow old. A magnificent white beard that stretches down from the sky and it’s been there so long that all we see are clouds. Your bright red petals now blackened and withering, a paradise that can’t exist if there’s nothing to compare it to.
Fading…
We can’t travel back in time through all this cigarette smoke, it’s too thick. Too pungent. I can see the lines in your face now, like the lines of a play that we’ve been reciting over and over all these years, and every day the words lose a little bit more meaning. We don’t get drunk to have fun anymore. We get drunk to forget that we can’t have fun like we used to without it. There was a time when your presence served as a reminder, a doorway between our world and something more beautiful. A meaning behind all of this empty dialogue that we swim in, and get stuck in, like honey and artificial sweetener, the illusion of making something better when we’re only making it worse. You were an escape, my underground railroad, but now I see that your tracks just run in circles. Leaving to come and coming to leave is all we’ve ever really done.
I’ve collected years like junk in my closet,
I forget what’s in there half the time…
Every now and then I still hear your voice, like a whisper in the back of my mind, blowing dust off these memories that have grown old and neglected. A quiet prayer now that I finally know what to pray for. You seem stressed out, disappointed, tired. I can relate. I’m too worried about my own life to spend time studying you now, or giving your pages much consideration. I’ve already read them a thousand times. But sometimes…
… like a light bulb that’s hell-bent on staying alive, you flicker. You flash like a struck match igniting before my eyes and drag me back to day one with a knowing smile. A glimpse in the rearview mirror. Stronger than any faith, anything I thought my jaded heart had learned over the years. I see a fleeting glimpse of what was locked away all this time – untainted, unbeaten, once known. A belief in beliefs; to stumble but keep going and trudge somewhere beautiful through all this mud, ignoring that the destination has always been inevitable defeat. Traveling to a place we always knew we’d end up. Even now, you have a way of making this failure taste a bit like victory. A type of success that only makes sense inside our home, this forgotten church. We spent all our lives questioning the existence of heaven and never stopped to consider that we’ve been surrounded by it all along.
When I see your face now, it’s not so much the sight of you that sticks out in my mind, but the feeling you evoke. A reminder —
That I still, and always will, have a lot to learn.
S.P.