After graduating I moved back to Springfield and committed myself to my family. I chose to stay with my grandmother in the last years of her life. This was my contemporary familial responsibility and my great pleasure out of love for my grandmother. In the past, a poor farmer boy living near a coast would often join a ship screw as a cabin boy or sailor to earn enough to take care of his family. Well, I joined a crew via the working world. I wanted to support myself and my family. Along the way I heard the siren’s call.
I became enamored with my siren, my beautiful, talented siren. An experience both amazing and incredible.
And then… I was shaken out of my stupor. The image broken, the mirage began to fade, my utopia came crashing down as a silent isolated Hiroshima in my head. Anger, sorrow, pain, frustration, betrayal, and other mixed feelings and combinations of feelings I didn’t even know existed or have a name for.
After it was over. I spent two months inside dwelling in darkness. nose to the grindstone, I buried myself in work and tried not to think about anything other. Nights laying in bed staring at the ceiling alone with my thoughts were dreaded. Time can be funny. Einstein agreed time is relative. I doubt heartache was considered in his equations. It is a scientific fact that time slows down the faster we move. Sounds silly, but it has been proven (check out physicist Brian Greene's Fabric of the Cosmos: Illusion of Time). My mind was moving too fast lost in thought. Two years of hoping for numbness passed strangely in the span of those two months. Two years alone. Two years of longing to forget the bad while hoping to preserve a glimmer of the good. The difficulty in this is finding the good that is not intertwined with the bad. Many are merely a path to other related bad memories. Memories tend to fall that way. I believe that memory is associative by nature. The more associations and connections, the stronger the memory. She was everything, so her memories are very strong. Ah! There is the rub! Not quite Billy Shakespeare’s mortal coil, but perhaps a contemporary social coil instead. We pick-up and carry many social coils. They are jobs, responsibilities, the roles we accept.
I accepted the role of boyfriend, i.e. a sailor to my siren. Now I’ve spent time drowned at sea beneath the tempest waves waiting to crawl out on a new beach and take air into my seemingly long since dead longs. I’ve waited for the day that the sun would once again warm my body and relieve me of the corpse-like cold.
From time to time I still dream of her, that past life, waking entangled together in our bed, in our townhome… Then I realize the dream is but a shadow cast upon the wall of Plato’s cave. Perhaps it’s just another allegory to confuse me of what is real. It is painful to wake from a warm dream of coupling to realize you lay now in a cold bed alone. It’s as if the sun never rises. Never shares its warmth. I keep waiting for the sun…
