My heart hurt like a shot of whisky in the winter. It burned like coal in my chest and it blacked out the hope and optimism and all that is still white and clean inside of me. I lied there on the couch like a dead man in his coffin staring at the wood paneling in a basement in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania.
She sat on the end of the couch in her summer skin. Her arms fell off of her shoulders and sat folded in her lap. like she wanted to hold to something. like everyone wants to put there hands on something. her eyes were painted on with watercolors below her bangs. and the heat and the light came in the windows from through the locust tree in the side yard.
My heart hurt like it had been boiled down brittle to the bone and was left to break at the slightest breath from her mouth. I wanted things to be different. I wanted to be happy. i wanted her eyes to be bright. I lied on the couch in a a basement in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania and felt like she was being removed from me like a root canal right through my soul.
I lied in a basement and wanted for just one thing in life, just once not be left to interpretation. I didn't want to have to read two sides to ever story. I didn't want contradictions or intangible concepts or theories. Just once i wanted something to be real. Real not like pain, but real like the punch to your face that makes you feel that way. Just once, i wanted to not rely on reactions, particular vocabulary, or clever wording. i didn't want rely on words at all. i didn't want to rely on individual style or fancy packaging, metaphors, fables, symbols, signs, omens, intuition, or second hand advice, parental advice, or over intellectualized day-time talk show advice. I wanted her and i to see face to face eye to eye.
just once i wanted to agree with her.
i will never ceased to be humbled by the miles and miles and hours and hours of life i see and how there will never be a single soul who will ever agree at any given hour in any given day what to call a glass that has the same amount of water in it as it does not.
I didn't want the whole world to change. just every piece of matter we had ever seen in our lives. just every piece of memory and thought and rational that ever occurred between us. i wanted them to be the same. i wanted both of our lives to be loaded on freight trains and have them gather up all the speed along all the track we had laid throughout our lives and collide head on. i wanted us both be derailed, and i wanted us to land in the wreckage on the same side of the track.
The locust tree swayed in the summer sun. I stared at the wood paneling on the wall as it somewhere in grain on the veneer there would be some useful information. She sat on the edge of the couch holding her knees for lack of something bigger.
The only thing that tears people away from each other more than ignorance is religion. Neither of which means the same thing to any two people on any given day. especially to the two on a couch in a basement in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania.
Life is living every day like I should write it down because it is worth reading, and seeing and feeling so much that you'll forget most of it if i don't.
It is feeling so much that words wont work and photographs are the closet thing i got.
Love is having a beautiful girl i think about at every red light and wish she was sitting shotgun with me through every green. and having no idea what she would be thinking in either color.
Love is getting a message from a friend telling me John Prine on the radio and open car window in Cincinnati reminds him of me.
It is skateboarding down the road at dusk with my dog who never leaves my side when in my presence.
Life is acknowledging every day that my heart, for now- is beating and the burner on the stove makes the teapot whistle and all the metal in the world is rusting in some way and realizing that no one has any concrete evidence of how this world ought work or what will happen when it is over and what i should all be doing until i find out.
Life is being on the South Beach Diet and then having my uncle show up out of the blue from Egypt, Ohio and allowing me the opportunity to hear about my life from my own voice while taking me to the Anacapa Brewery when i haven't drank a drop in weeks.
and so i all i can do to honor it all is to take the pictures of the red lights. and the green lights. All i can do is roll down the windows. All i can do is call my friends back. And just let my dog run down the road at dusk and follow a passion despite the encroaching understanding it will never take me far enough. it will i never be good enough to fill the passenger seat with who i want. It will never show me enough sunsets to understand what i should be doing doing while my heart is still beating and the teapot is boiling.