Occam's Razor

I was caught off-guard by the frost, and the deep breath-in burned my lungs. Summer's reprise brings hubris and you forget how the winter-cold sneaks under collars and finds its way down the spine, chills you to your bones. You forget how much you have to fight. And how tiring it gets, how it wears you down to a little nub. But how you cling to it, try to find strength in it, resolve to not be fooled by summer again.

She sat at her desk and I in a chair next to her. "The most important thing," she said, "is the approval that you give to yourself. And strength is in cleaving yourself from those who put that asunder." It was so simple and yet it had never occurred to me prior to her saying it. An axiom that is at once sad and liberating. There are behaviors that can only lead to pain and suffering, and any medical doctor would tell you in your misery simply to stop the behaviors. And it would be obvious, and you would stop them. There are relationships also that only lead to pain and suffering and you can look at everything stretched out over time and see that there is always only one outcome. And how foolish it seems to think there will every be anything different. Life is the thing that changes, not people. And how you have to protect yourself.

Like Myxolydian

A day exactly like this. Gunmetal grey of the autumn sky looming low and pendulous, parked in a cold Elyria parking lot waiting to go into a cold Elyria building full of vice and mistake-making and reckoning. There is the requisite smell in the air of leaves fermenting, fallen apples, the world getting ready for its cocoon of snow and ice and of longing. This is the song that was on then and it filled me with the lonely warmth of Ohio in September, a long dark day with a woodfire at the end of it, the red-cheeked kiss of wine and the slow release of leaf from branch, life’s longing for itself. She gets out of the truck and goes in, emerges an hour later and how sad and beautiful it is to look back like that, at all she will have to get through and how much hope there was and how it drains from you and sometimes you don’t even notice until nothing is left but the soul’s winter, that thunderous sad quiet feeling in the core of you, that loneliest leaving. The slow release.

We sat across the table from one another drinking margaritas and she had so much hope in her eyes, that he would come back, that everything would return to normal, and it’s been a month, and I had no good way to give her advice other than the story of my experience and how long the body can take to heal, how you can hurt everywhere. And after all the words that hope clung still to her heart and there was nothing more to say. There is so much heartache in life, I offered. But myocardium is the strongest of all the tissues and it will tear and strain and break into a million little pieces, but it will keep beating pumping moving. And so this becomes your task, as well. We stepped out into cold rain and broken asphalt and the realization that sometimes you just have to take the hard road. It is early in the evening and yet dark already, our paths home wind us in different directions and there are wisps of smoke emerging from the chimney as I pull in the drive, he has a glass of wine and we settle into the warmth of each other’s arms, against the cold and the wet and the dark of the outside. The slow release.

Mon innocence me ferait pleurer.

He didn't mind, to be there. You have to sense that disdain too, regardless of how it's covered over with sweetness. She didn't know I was sitting across the table from her and I looked across the yard at him standing sentinel at the grill and I just felt so much sadness, for what he would feel if he knew, for what she was going to feel in the second it would take her to look up and those words can't be taken back, once uttered. I wanted to cry for all three of us, just sucked back the tears and up for one more shot and

This broken road.

Maybe I am severely mistaken and just can't find the right way. Someone once told me that you fall in love the first time for love, and the second time for money. Any variation and you are just a damn fool. But I have always been different. I have always found shame in that. As though there is a bar I just haven't found the way to measure up to, and that my life's journey is the trek toward that strength, the end goal being the other side of some status quo that until that moment will always be foreign, exotic. And he looks at me, from the grill across the yard, and all I want is that smile, the green eyes with the creases at the corner, and how he laughs at me when I emerge from the pig skin discarding sweat shop. And how she sat across from me and said that, how I can never talk about that. This parallel that I don't want to draw,

[how can you not]

new orleans and the announcement that I made and how I could feel how sick it made her and I can't remember what I felt then. Afraid. There has to be some point at which I realize that I know what is best for me. And faith in the decisions, once made. I wish I had been born the son of a female shark.