Excuse me, but this is rambling and rabbit-trailing. You’ll find some amusement, maybe. Just remind yourself that it is a condition of the Midnight Disease, and move on from there. You have been warned about it.
Tiny sensations of broken glass across the chalkboard of a soul gone sour from the constant attentions of a chaste torturer. Like a wave of time and light and space expanded out into an indeterminable vastness of watching life go by with jaded eyes and constrained lips.
Never again to see the light of an untouched sun, or to feel the warmth of a regular moon. Always they will be a sad, swarmed, similar reminder of someone who touched the sun and stole the moon and laid them both to rest in tongues of fire underneath a sunset sky. Crematorium in the loosest sense of the word; just a pile of brambles behind a broken down shed that served dual-purpose as a hovel in which to spend hours among friends.
But now the shed is gone, burned up in that self same inferno that eclipsed the sun and broke the moon into tiny dimes and nickels that scattered among the rose petals and wood chips of the workshop floor. An entire childhood condensed into one smell and one longing.
One longing that never can be reached, and sounds more noble when spoken of than when really thought about. So don’t think about it, just pretend that you’re missing a love or that you wish that you hadn’t said that thing then, or this thing now. Just pretend that you aren’t going to go back and have the same feeling again and again on your way home through the darkness.
That’s the thing about darkness, though. When you know that you have a friendly darkness – not one that houses monsters and hides men with murder on the mind and ill-repute on the record – when you have a friendly darkness full of all the night sounds and smells and feelings, that’s when you can walk in safe solitude. The loneliness of someone who’s on their way home and knows that the light will be on and the laughter will be rolling through the door. It’s all ready to be opened and let out into the night. Then come inside to the din along with the glitter-bugs and the moths that are drawn to the overhead light as much as you are drawn to the glowing people.
You all know those people that I mean. The ones that test all your faculties to keep up with their jokes and small braveries. The ones that teach you new ways to be productive and still caring. The ones that have so much fun that you can’t help having a better day for having talked to them at lunchtime.
He always says that he isn’t going to keep on doing this every year. He isn’t going to come back to help those kids and their newest friends to learn and grow. But then he comes back from a five mile hike at five in the morning and tells me about how much fun he had, and how he helped that one kid get over his homesickness by playing his guitar. He’s a guitar player, this friend of mine that would never admit to being as cool as I saw so many times. He’s a really amazing guitar player and I can’t see how to do it; he just makes it look so easy.
And then there are all the other people that you know. Like those people that you shove into your little boxes when you first shake hands. The ones that keep surprising you when they jump out of their boxes and begin to dance. By the time that you realize that you were wrong about where you put them, they’ve already climbed into the right slot and started cracking jokes with their new neighbors.
But before I continue – rather, I shall not continue; those people won’t let me brag too much, otherwise they might think the masses are listening to me – I would like to muse on another subject.
Age has a way of doing things to a person. Even before you’ve seen half of your life, you begin to feel incredibly old. Then you look at pictures of people that are dead by now, and you feel akin to them in age, even though the smiling faces of the picture is older than your parents.
Pictures are one of those funny inventions that have gotten so many forms of complaint and misuse and still are so high on the list of means of remembrance. They still think that a picture is worth a thousand words, even though I have seen many that aren’t worth the time it takes to print them, and even more that told me an entire life story without so much as a tear falling from one eye in the crowd. Pictures that teach me how to do a job even though I’m not sure which one of the forty people held that job before me.
Procrastinating Poet 