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.