My music scrambles for a moment, and I’m struck in the ears by Sonata No.1 in G Minor. The solo violin catches me off guard, and I recall instantly the moment I heard the adagio that would later haunt me for years. It was how the wood sang to God with each note being scraped off the strings like a human voice. By the fuga, I had descended into warring choruses of the angels, as if I were intruding in the debates of heaven.
I am confronted by him in the rose garden, and I stop to prune him away. He mars the beauty.
The final chord echoes its way into resolution, and I grope my way out of memory.
Having lived in LA for almost four years now, I realize how sensitive I’ve become to weather shifts. Part of what I signed for when I sealed the deal with UCLA was the undying summer that I had always heard about during my years in the South. My days are so easily broken by the weight of grey clouds. I’m so unlike the rest of my friends who are inspired and moved by the rains. Petrichor, while beautiful to contemplate in verse, never strikes the right chords. I fold into myself on those days, making close friends with tight corners and heavy blankets. I suppose the best part of rainy days is knowing you’re not out there, a kind of schadenfreude.
As I begin to pack my bags full of souvenirs, odds and ends, and boxes I hope never to reopen, I think of how I need to dedicate a space to LA’s perpetual summer. It is as much a spirit as it is a feeling and a force. To brighten my own day will be the challenge, to take out my little ball of LA sun when the Philadelphia winters rage.
Take the box, I say. Take all that I’ve returned to you in a handy parcel, because you’ve returned kisses, not ardor. I rest on that, perched on the debris of what was once poetics, once the architecture grander than the minutiae we call our selves.
But you know, you can take all that, too. Cram every cardboard inch of with what suits you because I remember sizing you up the moment I met you. But not every measurement falls into place, and not every dinner jacket fits. And as much as the loose threads may have, in some places, tied their knots, we evidently have not.
So take the box. Winehouse begs you to.
A certain fortitude is necessary to waddle your way through old mires, and I’ve lately been finding the muscles to swallow what is supposedly good for me crushed into abrasive pills. You are what you eat, they say, and I feel the dead weight in this belly of mine because bitterness is so heavy. But I would think bittersweet is the heaviest when your spirit holds its breath for what may be. Either way, there is muck to be raked through. That is our baseness, the job we all must do.
I discovered early on that you can ball up more than just your fists. So I tightened my core and snaked inward from the invasive grey that was this morning. I’ve tried to make peace with the unwanted dampness, the way it all seeps into clothing, bones, and dispositions, but it is the miles of grey that I cannot reconcile.
In sweats, I find my self jogging uphill toward the vaporous skyline that crunches on my spirits. The quiet plays the devil on my shoulder, and I ask him if this is all the color of Hell.
His response was perhaps the most chilling: “At least for you it is.”
It took roughly nine dollars slipped to the sacristan for 3 votive candles. A wish per flame, she told me, as I bowed my head for Christ’s mercy and sips of holy water. Little did He know that He would not be the only man I would kneel for.
Speeding down the 280, I kept my eyes on more than just the road. Salvation for me intertwined itself with the horizon obscured among the rolling hills and bay fog. It laid to rest among the lit homes, for they are my candles burning with wishes. The city is an altar to all that is godly in the stories of its citizens, and my own prayers fill its cement pages.
I left the print of my lips on the mug before he stopped to grab hold of my hand. I almost let slip my fingers from the handle as he let his dammed tears run. He asked me if I ever feared that the poetry of the city might up and leave. I could only respond that I’ve only tasted its parlor tricks, for I choose the life of a nomad purely because I cannot stand illusory romances for very long. I could see him fighting with the salts, but with that, I grasped his trembling hand and placed it back on the cold of the glass table.
I knew then that I absolutely had to leave: him and this labyrinth of mirages.
In line with my sartorialist fetishes are the look and feel of a tailored suit on the right man. When body meets fabric, it is the birth of an unmistakable finesse of a man who is actually wearing his clothes.
But I am equally, if not more, drawn to what he looks like when he removes more than just his clothing. A disrobing of the self that the layers have only served to stifle and choke with a layer of sweat. That saline taste is real: that may be the only thing he wears to bed, but that is what it truly means to be in the flesh.
I eskimo the windowpane to decipher the renegade codex of the rain. Like some morse imitation, the droplets rap million-fold paragraphs against the windowsill in dances, and I am powerless to understand its watery volumes with pages made of surface tension. So they stream, these sodden phrases, into puddles of wayside words where I, among many others, shall drown.
Shooting the breeze means to kill innocent time by bleeding out its seconds, and he was such a hunter. As a Swede, he taught me to fika, which meant after awhile more than cups of coffee with too much creamer. I had under my belt the passions of la vie bohème, and we would share in improper conjugations and tea cakes split in uneven halves.
And I would, while pillowed in his hair, ask him to tell me crime stories that pervaded his bookshelves that smoked at gunpoint. He responded with a fika that did not end even when I cast my final flower on his brow.
