Monday, February 27, 2012

the li(v)es that were

So it snows again and I think I’ve heard this song before. I stand outside and smoke listening to it’s hushed lyrics as I close my eyes and think about a night another lifetime ago. Inside, where it is warm, my friends sing and dance, everyone so happy, we live our lives as though the world will end tomorrow. Laugh and cry, sing and fight. Do or die. Everyone is so happy and in love and so optimistic.. everyone except of course...

What were we doing that night? Yes, it was right before Christmas. You and I drove around with my camera in hand, hopped up on coffee and cigarettes, in search of the tackiest Christmas House. “The Griswold House” is what you called it. Such an innocuous, disposable moment, which I cannot help but recall again and again and again and again. Like a scratched record repeating itself, a distant song. An antiquated voice accompanied by bittersweet, profoundly beautiful violins, another dimension outside of mine. It’s scope so unfathomable and incomprehensible to me now but then it seemed like I was in such control. Taking it for granted like an arrogant fool. Oblivious to my idiocy except now I can see..

Is it a reasonable assumption to make that I was in fact the same man then as I am now as I was a decade ago as I will be a decade from now? Alone I bemoan yesterdays and chase ghosts. Surrounded by four claustrophobic corners in a grungy room I can’t be anything else but what I am but what I was. We were beautiful you and I yet I know even now I would have done the same thing and let you go accusing you of being a “whore.” Yet who am I to have judged what you were?

A voice from inside invites me in to do another line and another shot, another soft and delicate bite of the Lotus blossom so I may try, and fail, to forget you and yesterday.