"...I raise my flags, don my clothes,
Its a revolution I suppose.
We're painted red, to fit right in,
Whoa-o..."
from Imagine Dragons, their incredible "Radioactive"
Our familiar star is, as I start this, twenty degrees above the horizon, swathing us in orangey glare. My favorite time of day.
Songbirds are chipping away at the last greenage of my over-wintered golden chard, and I'm pretty sure they need it more than I do. Scarlet runner beans shine their blossoms for the myriad bee species. Garlic lays over for its eventual harvest, and that's sooner than it thinks. Walla Wallas grow bulby. The compost bin does it slow thing, yielding occasional dark, dank tea for my other garden investments... The carrots tell me they love it. Eggplants spurt forth their unique blossoms and fruit.
Sometimes my closest hobby-horse back home is those garden boxes. Other times, my canines - currently bought off with butcher bones - demand the most attention. They'll soon need a long walk, and I'll need one, as well. My new drummer's calves need their aerobic stimuli. The drums and cymbals are not here, or I'd be playing right now. I have 30-plus years of "air-drumming bad habits" to break open.
Life has been so very interesting lately.
A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to have a real birthday - elk-rifle shooting in the morning and a tasty BBQ in the evening, complete with my close friends and family.
There was German chocolate cake after, so... good times.
These last few weeks I've been able to spend time with my nieces from My Lady's side, incredible girls I've known since the days they were born. We ate a smorgasbord of Korean seafood/galbi BBQ the 1st evening. The next day, we all walked the touristic Hell that Pike Place Market has become, then tasted 7-9 lovely Asian teas before purchasing 3, and ate fresh Manila clams and mussels on the waterfront, a spectre of docking container ships being pushed in by tugs, local harbor tours puttering out, ferries coming and going, and the occasional sailboat. BTW, "Sylvester the Mummy" at Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe still looks exactly like he did when I was 10 years old. Ditto "Sylvia." Funny, that.
The whole area is rife with so many buskers, all flavours included, as compared to 15 years ago, or even 5 years ago. Seattle does like its musicians. And they LOVE Seattle.
Other thoughts include a strange, simplistic revelation following a dream last week. There were two dreams, so I should credit that 'other' dream as well, it was an Assistant Coach.
The Primary Dream was the intense one. I found myself in some shithole like extreme Eastern Europe, or perhaps the Ukraine. Dingy, smelly and polluted. Primarily gray. The good thing is, I'm with a gorgeous (non-familiar) woman. And I am armed, and equipped, to protect her. A half-dozen Russian thugs are chasing us, and we're in the sun-shafted guts of an ancient factory, long stripped of anything valuable, a repository of dust and lost visions, utterly abandoned. It is cold. And I know we have to get out of there, everything depends on it.
And that is my charge in this dream.
I have a smallish 9mm semi-auto strapped on the inside of my belt-loop, behind my right hip. A diver's knife resides in a hidden sheath in my left boot. A grey backpack contains food, water, ammunition, and a lightweight sleeping bag. I'm almost out of ammunition, but that doesn't worry me.
I have to protect this random hottie.
We begin running and negotiating the detritus of the old factory - shouting to our north means we run southwest. Whatever cleanliness was left to our clothes soon succumbs to the musty rat shit of the building's carcass. We work together, and spill into the broad daylight...
A pair of railroad tracks runs east-west at the south end of the factory, so we sprint there, running along the top of a low berm with numerous wintering deciduous trees. The gravel is rough cut, uneven footing for sore feet, and the cold is like celery, crisp and green. A faint smell of car exhaust trickles through the breezes, and I strain to hear their engines, and civilization.
"One love,
We get to share it
It leaves you baby
If you don't care for it..."
U2 "One"
What doesn't seem to be reaching my foremost thoughts is that former lover.
I think I've said my peace, and I think her soul-killing silence is the best current answer, given her other distractions. (Not that I don't think about her, but my stomach doesn't tighten and wince when I catch myself being reminded of her. She could drive by this house honking her Honda horn, tits-a-blazin', blasting Peter Gabriel and I think I'd just sigh, drink a slug of warming beer, and go back to my yard and garden foci. They feed me, literally and emotionally, more than she has in the last 22 years.
Plus, I changed my phone number, so neener-neener. (It's now YOUR area code, 926-4433. I'm about 99.97% sure you won't ever dial it. So, I offer it freely to you. Least I can do, right?))
Here's my quickie version of our 'make-up call.' Brought to you by my irrelevant fantasy life.
Ring-ring. Ring. Ring.
"Fuck." I stop what I'm doing, and that could be almost anything... from soldering little wires or copper pipes, to weeding the garden, to picking up dog poop, to loading my truck with saws, to familiarizing with my crows, to putting tiny steel nails in fine wood... Where's my phone? I may - or may not - be on a ladder.
My pocket. Fumbling ensues. Maybe I have gloves on. So, I peel them off, if I do.
I find it, lurking deep in my right cargo pocket. Past my wallet, several nails, a shitty blue ball-point pen and a layer of fine sawdust.
I sorta recognize the number. The prefix is completely familiar.
So, answer or not? I have about 1 more second to decide...
"Fuck." And then I swipe it up to answer.
"This is me." (And, in spite of my long-known, self-designed ninja training, my stomach drops out like I've been thrown from a plane. Again.)
What the hell could she say? I've played these scenarios in my pathetic cranium enough times to know that she has nothing to offer me except those few answers to those questions I iterated last year. If she answers any of them honestly, it meant she loved me longer than she claimed she did, and felt something for years. Which, as we all know, is not what she portrayed to the outside world and her cadre of man-eaters. That is the challenge - get her to admit she loved me and that she was a lovely, dramatic freakazoid about the break-up and the year after. A Mission Impossible. A goal. One should set goals.
"Brent?" Her voice still has that breathiness and delicious lilt to it. Nice. Some things never change.
"It's me." I'm trying to catch my breath, quietly.
"It's Beatrix." (She finishes with a resolute sigh. It, too, is familiar.)
"I'm fully aware. I saw the number." Dork! Breathe. Breathe.
"Can you talk?"
What does THAT mean? Fuck. WILL I talk? Sure. CAN I talk? Barely. SHOULD I talk? Maybe. What will it solve? Everything, perhaps.
"Yeah," I stammer out, "What do you want to talk about, because I hate wasting time. Get to it, please."
"I know that you want to talk about the past," she says, "But I was young and I don't remember a lot of it like you do."
Really? I think. But I don't say it. Can she be honest with HER past? There were some key moments for me. If she can't remember those, it's like dealing with a roulette ball.
"Do you recall saying you had done 'everything you could think of' to make me hate you at that McDonalds on Samish Way? With fries?"
"Yeah, I do. I - I..."
"Then that's a start, I suppose." Breathe. "I-"
"Why do you keep writing about me?"
"Because I still think about you. Almost every day." Deep breath. (That's not correct. It's every fucking day.)
"Do you still curse me?"
"No," I begin, "I'm over that now. Took a few decades. I felt - I thought - I had legitimate reason to be pissed at you."
"You probably did. Sorry."
"I wish that helped. Maybe you could spit up an 'enlightened' explanation. We're on the phone here, Beatrix. That's exceptional, in and of itself. Shit."
I heard a deep breath. A gut breath.
"I never wanted to love you."
Which I already knew. She'd been programmed against intimate love before I met her. I had to overcome large obstacles. Old stuff, to me.
"And?" I was getting impatient. I want those fucking explanations. I'm me, still.
"I did love you," she said, "But I was under pressure to..."
"I know about that." Breathe.
"I was under pressure, to leave you and finish college, and not be distracted by a close relationship."
"Which you had anyway, with D, right?"
"Yeah."
"So it was all a shell-game? Hide the one away?"
"What?"
"Well, I ceased to exist to you by your decision, then you ensured I could not talk to you legally, then you kept penetrating MY bubble. For a few years, it seemed to me."
The wheels spin and the world rotates in a whirl, and I'm tired.
Peace out. To be continued.
( For Those Who Haven't Kept Up With All This Shit: Please, my Lady Beatrix, explain why you were in that blizzard rhat day. And at Boulevard Park listening to me for an hour, or more, on the next bench. And in Arlington, right before you went off to Grad school. Tell me those answers, and I'll magically disappear again. We don't even have to deal with graffiti, right?
Yeah. Silence. I'm used to that. You're actually excellent at 'silence.')
No comments:
Post a Comment