It starts with a blister.

She has a magic in her eyes, and that’s what hooked me. I have this toxic relationship with newness, I have this need to be intoxicated by the exoticness of it (and accepted by it), and to drink so much of it that it becomes familiar, to ultimately understand it, and to be in a position by and by to cast it aside. This is a vicious cycle. It is a dance with a thousand permutations and I have allowed myself to go too far beyond the script. When she asks a question I want so desperately to answer, despite my good judgment.  I crave her good graces.

Everything is so impossibly linked to everything else. We play this game, as adults, as though we are driven by the best of intentions and we want to do what is Right and what is Just and be Fair and Balanced. I have only ever met one like that and I don’t know him that well yet (still exotic.)  I have this fervent belief that the rest of us are trying so hard to just not be exposed for the frauds that we are. Or perhaps fraud is too harsh a word. The completely and totally fallible and broken creatures scrambling desperately to just keep it together that we are.  To be accepted. Life is such a grand and broken adventure and we allocate so much time and resource to pretending otherwise. We kitty ourselves up with the belief that it’s ordered and linear and logical, and that accordingly we should behave as such.

“The beauty,” I told them, two sets of twelve year old eyes wide in anxious anticipation, “ is in the sloppiness. You become infinitely powerful when you acknowledge that your behind-the-scenes is as authentically you as is your highlights reel.” To fully embrace that, myself.

Sometimes I hate that this is the place I take it back to when I feel this way, but it is there, nonetheless. It’s a late night downtown and I’m riding the bus home in the early dark, of course it’s raining, and when I round the corner the windows are aglow with the amber of warmth that transcends time and space and I know, I know that Rachmaninoff is playing on the inside. To know a love like that. When it’s gone you spend the rest of your life trying to recreate it. There is a giant piece of my heart that still takes its mail at 432 Division Street, and I am reminded most acutely when the leaves begin to fall and the night air begins to carry a chill along with that feeling of boundless opportunity and of mischief.  It was missing a piece. And it was not happy. So it set about to find the missing piece.