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I guess I am truly getting better. I let the solstice pass with only the usual thoughts about Gatsby, and thoughts of my summer project, and it was only today, two full days past, that I remembered mine and your beginnings – shooting stars, kisses, and all – and it made me smile.

It’s not for the want of beauty that I still want you. Not that you are not beautiful. It is not that at all. It is not for the fact that I have the image of you in my stupid little head that still wants you, or the image, and it all gets too fucked up. It is not for the want of Jesus. It is not for the want of headaches. It is not for the lack of tennis. It is not for the lack of sex. It is not for the lack of your skin next to mine… Hold on, I went too far. It is for the lack of of you lying close to me. Skin on skin. It is for the lack of you in my life. It is for those lacks. It is for the lack of me never giving up. It is for the want of a non-giving-up you. It is for the want of growing old with you in my arms, night after night, and babies asleep in the other room, and me with a bottle in their mouth and not in mine finally, and for me realizing there is as much reason to stay in this place as there is to go anywhere else in this little world.

There’s a tiger outside in the bushes, and he’s drunk and screaming, growling, howling in this Lake Claire night. Not me, I sit inside and listen to this discontent and wait for the morning. I wait for the calm down. The chillout. I wait for the feelings to subside, for me and that crazy cat.
The neighbors have called the fire trucks and the little guy is standing on the corner by the stop sign, without a shirt, and throwing rocks at my car. There’s a woman sitting and weeping on the curb.
Nothing ever happens until it does.
It has to be 10 degrees cooler there. The electricity bills must be lower.
Work will kill me in the end. We work too much. We love too little. We live too little also.
Tonight there’s a full moon in my heart. The trees are lighted up with something like christmas lights, but different. A naked lady runs up and down the street screaming… partially in pain, partially in joy. She is naked and I cannot help from looking, so I do, but she is not you.

I fell down a thousand wells to get here. Thirty three years and a month or two to get there. I like my butterflies, but not like you like butterflies. Ten day off medication. Wish that this mess wasn’t mine to deal with.
I sing alleluia, alleluia. The lord is my shepherd. He makes me whole. I ask you for so many things, oh pretty boy. I still believe. I still believe. I still believe. After all of this I finally and still believe.
The prisms through which we try to view this life bring us sadness, joy, heartbreak, etc. Mine is a dark crystal, yet turning light.
I drink sparkling water from a can tonight, with a touch of lemon, or something like that.
Don’t kill me when I think these things can be real. Don’t kill me, oh lord, for believing.
Take me to a river where all of these sins can be washed away. A swift running river where everything I have done is five miles down stream already. Where we have all already seen God and passed or signed up for the passage.
Forgive me father for I have done things. I have told lies. I have tried my best to protect whatever it is that I understand myself to be. Forgive me father, and mother, and friends, and little tiny animals. Forgive me, all of you.
There are pictures of me, in this place, of people I do not know, and they keep asking me to remember, and I continue to say no.
Let’s fall asleep and see if we can awake as Peter Pan. Please Peter Pan? Can we make this happen. Before I become nothing and the world takes on far more heft?
Six days on the road, but I’m gonna make it home tonight… but to what?

I hope you are smiling a lot.

For the time that’s left I will keep this place like a museum to what has passed between the two of us. I will be a little hermit curator moving items from one place to the next until they are exactly as I remember them. I will water the plants and dust the relics. Then I will sell off the things I can, and return the other things to the donors. I will curate no longer.
I don’t know that it is as much me moving to something new and exciting as it is me feeling as if I am moving away from something. Not something altogether bad, just something that I cannot seem to make sense of at such close range.
We talk of not knowing whether we can love anyone else the way we love each other, yet the love we do have between us is not enough to make us want to try again. What a sad lot we are. I know only time heals the wounds, helps us make sense of these conundrums, and I am sure it will eventually all work out for both of us, but even tonight, when I thought I had let it all go, returning from the movie in the park, I see his car once again in front of your house and it sent my spirits straight down the crapper. I could always drive a circuitous route so as not to have to see these things, but I got used to it when the car used to always be there, and now I have gotten used to it not being there, and tonight caught me off guard. I figured he had move somewhere in the neighborhood and just walked over now.
It’s likely I spend too much time wondering what your life is like with him. I get the scant details of you not being completely happy, but I don’t know what that really means. I imagine another mopey boy that you are trying to make happy, much like myself when we lived together. I imagine you dreaming of something more and better, much like you did when you were with me. I want to come and take you away and make it all better, show you that I am better and stronger and all the things you want me to be, but I have read too much self-help at this point to believe that will work.
It’s funny that the movie tonight was Casablanca. Ilsa, Ingrid Bergman, caught between Rick and Victor. One the politically-involved-to-a-fault, world-changing, man to which she is married. The other, the one she is most passionate about, but the one with which it would never really work, yet, the one she would throw it all away for. I felt there was likely something to be learned in the story, but I cannot quite figure out what. I am not sure if I am Victor or Rick in this story, perhaps a little of both, and if I am a little of both the lesson becomes harder to learn. Do I get the girl or not? Does she truly want to be with me? Where does my happiness lie? What is the right thing to do in the situation?
I am still not sure. I am still not sure that Rick and Ilsa didn’t find there way back to each other somewhere down the line, after the war was over. Perhaps they found the country house out West, far away from Casablanca, far away from that tortured past.
All I do know is that Humphrey Bogart puts Ingrid bergman on a plane with her husband at the end, and believes that he did the right thing. He then walks off into the bright fog and toward who knows what. I guess I will be doing the same too soon, but for now I want to keep all these little things around me, to feel as if I am keeping a little piece of you with me for a little while longer.

It’s an hour past midnight in Lake Claire, and way over in Candler Park you are fast asleep, have been for hours, perhaps alone, perhaps with someone else. Perhaps in those dreams your heart rises up through the ether and into the sky since you say it has been hanging heavily in your chest as of late. Perhaps sometimes in those dreams I find my way in, as you frequently do in mine. I don’t know if I will ever write anything that is not in some way for, or about, you. The dedication of the first book would read, “For my mom and dad,” and then printed in invisible ink would be “and Grier, wherever you are.” Perhaps I fool myself. I don’t even know if that Grier is really you. It’s funny how you feel like you have lost knowledge of someone if you don’t see them in a couple of months, when some people you can not see for years and you pick up right where you left off.
I am not sure that the you that would receive such a dedication would be you at all. I have created such goddesses in my head. You are one, the main one. Athena enshrined in your Parthenon – the one in Nashville. Muses are gods I suppose, and you never should marry your muse. You should bring her gifts, and I guess I have done that. You should feed the muse, but you should never marry her. I still wish to be the fool though.
Perhaps tonight it is still cold in the Yaak Valley. There are a couple of emergency lights on now down by the Dirty Shame Saloon. There’s a couple 20 years our senior. Let’s call them Rick and Elizabeth. In the late 80’s, just after college, they moved there looking for a simpler life, and a place to love and create. His muse is the land, and texture, and the animals, and atmosphere, and the changes of the season, and mostly Eli. Later they get married and have children and those children laugh and walk in the woods and think that dad is strange and that mom is beautiful, and they would have it no other way. His books sell, and she sings till the birds join in chorus.
You should never marry your muse? Is the Grier of my mind the Grier of flesh and blood, raising her heart and spirit to the skies, while asleep over there in that other neighborhood. Given the chance, I would take mine.
Come back from Sewanee, get in the car and go to Texas and take your chance?