Madeleines

A hike up Brook Road, minding my own business, feeling a little bit free and light, and there's purple clover and Queen Anne's lace. 

I will look for you in old Honolulu
San Francisco, Ashtabula
You are going to have to leave me now I know
I'll see you in the sky above
In the tall grass, in the ones I love
You're gonna to make me lonesome when you go

Or the door to the deck is open, the Ten Mile River rushing on a darkening night and you record it "for no one in particular." But you do record and post it. And it gets one reaction from someone else. Or you wake in the middle of the night and the first thought is watching sleep, the slow rise and fall of the back, face turned away—fully clothed, a dark blue sweater, a scarf still on. You recall being glad to have made a space. 

Or you're at a restaurant and it's any restaurant you were at, not the one you are actually at. 

The night sky. Never shared. But still a push. The feeling of my own fingertips, steepling with my other fingertips. Impossible but the case. The moon in any phase. Rising, waxing, waning, since I'm always up before dawn now. I've seen the Moon in every state of light dress the past several months, even with one eye. 

Palms. Of the hand variety. 

Surely you'll stop recalling all of these random scenes. And you recall the dumb line "Don't call me Shirley," and you never did get to watch a dumb movie together. And that tumbles into Kate B's This Woman's Work:


All the things we should've said that I never said
All the things we should have done that we never did
All the things we should have given but I didn't
Oh darling make it go
Make it go away
Give me these moments
Give them back to me
Give me that little kiss
Give me your talking hands

This year another road trip. Pulling off in Arkansas. nothing on my mind. To a scuzzy gas station. Not a cloud on the horizon. Back up over the fairly high arcing bridge to the ramp to I-40 and there it is. You hadn't even realized it was the same place. But the thick humid green and the seemingly sweaty breathing trees and the little winding path- if it isn't the same spot, it's the same in one's mind. It might as well have happened. 

It was the strangest thing, back then, tumbling back west and falling so hard at the same time. Immolated. 

Yes, of course. 

As natural and necessary as any obvious thing. 

Yes, of course.

Summoned by petrichor: the rainbow over the hotel. One thing also starkly clear: one of those brilliant blue Santa Fe skies, high white clouds, having left the house, alone in my car, wondering, why am I leaving? I knew why, in all the ordinary ways, of course. But I'll never know why.

February, snow lined streets, ice in the air. coat and scarf, into the car, "What do you want to do? Where do you want to go?" "I don't know, anything really, anywhere, with you." "Let's go get married. Today."

Yes, of course. 

If and if and if. 

Every single meme is a madeleine. The litmus test is- is it good enough? Few are, so one settles for passable, most often. Every single thing that catches my attention feels like it goes out in that direction. It won't stay. It has to be shared. It reaches out that way no matter what I try to do about it. A lesson. 

Sometimes it gets tiresome and I feel angry, stupid, out of control, or just like a sucker. Not all of this again. She's gone, the decision was made, get the fucking fuck over it. But it is not under my control. It is what it is. Or I just get tired of being out of control. Too bad, I guess. Too bad. 

This is where easing into accepting myself exactly as I am comes in. Impossible. My unmediated reaction is to want to punch myself in the face until I shut up. 

These are all merely the G rated madeleines. A weltering world of G rated memories. The reminders that go all the way down the rating scale, never mind those. But I will say that sometimes one of those might flash like magnesium and drop me. I do consciously exert tremendous effort around those sometimes, just because they are the most impossible of all, and the disparity is too severe. I do have that defense operating sometimes.

Outside of time. We said "weirdling spectral time hops" as way of accounting for that strange feeling of being outside of the stream of time. It fits. I can hear somebody saying "yeah right, I think there's plenty of evidence that you're trapped in time like a dead bug in amber."

Ann Arbor sunrise

Traveling when you wish you could be with someone with whom you cannot be is a weird experience, with moments free and light and moments a rusty dagger. I think the strongest thing, second to the memories, is the wish to tell, to communicate, for experience to be shared, not only in the documentarian sense, but specifically with one who gets it. "They would love this, they would love that, they would love this, they would love that." Sometimes sweet and tender, sometimes fucking infuriating. "Shut the fuck up," I gently suggest to myself. 

But that is not an option. And the universe is reinforcing that, as the longer I am on the road, the more closed in silence and distance things have been. As if, in moving closer spatially, for each mile toward, three miles of metaphor are added between. Typical. 

I get the fierce urge to delete all of the above, to not express it, let alone "still" be in it. It's a flashing, sword-sharp resentment. Not rusty, but like surgical steel. But it's not lasting. And it's not to much avail anyway. It's been a wild and weird two years, or will have been, in three days. I don't claim to understand it. Not trying. 

Today, farther west, farther north. No matter where I go, there I am, and, for a starkly empty space, it's always weirdly, spectrally weirdling full.