memories of grey rooms

He had seen him come in, recognized him only barely, it had been years and he hoped that he would pass on by. It had been a long time. But like clouds off the coast purple with a promise, a half hour or so later john walked over, a drunken rhythm to his saunter. he thought then that time tended to heal most things, but perhaps not wounded prides.

He didn’t want to do this. He didn’t want to do it here, with these casual acquaintances, ringing him in this position, and publically it was hard to control judgement. But he didn’t want to do it in general. ‘john, do really want to do this now?’ he said before he could start, ‘its been a long time’. After he said it he thought on it, it had been five, maybe six years, ‘half a decade’

‘yes I want to do this now, I don’t care how long its been, you’

He cut him off, ‘why’

The question halted him but a moment, ‘because you fucked my wife.’

He could have sworn the volume of the whole room reduced, probably imagined. But every head in hearing distance turn, involuntary reaction. He could hear the people behind him, his company, their spines straighten. He hadn’t noticed scott, another name and face from a youth that seemed all too far away, behind john, but he could have sworn he heard his teeth set, molars over molars.

He set his drink down and squared his shoulders to him, they weren’t the same height but they were close. ‘if memory serves me, you’d moved out of your house- left your wife and infant daughter- and moved in with some intern from work’. He blocked out the people, he didn’t want this spectacle, but he wasn’t about to go down as the only guilty party, even if he was guilty.

John’s eyes narrowed, that brief moment where to an onlooker it is almost impossible to tell the difference between whether he would scream or cry. The voice that came out was neither, ‘we grew up together, played football together, why would you do it, you knew we were married still’

He couldn’t imagine a universe where any of that shit mattered, or living a life where the temporary comraderie of a playing field lays the chains of some eternal obligation. Then again he couldn’t have imagined this moment, before it happened, and under the haze of some bars buzzing light something that should have receded quietly into nothingness was dredged back.

‘I saw her by chance you know, I wasn’t in atlanta long, a few months, and I saw her in a bar. And we talked for a bit, she was a shell of herself. A ghost man. As any girl would be when left from someone ten years younger. The post partum depression didn’t help, but you being across town in some other girls bed. She was a mess. So I took her out, tried to remind her who she was, still fun. Still sexy. Still a wonder.’

It had started like that, talks and casual drinks and the occasional stories about high school, and sharing songs, or bands or making idle conversation, and then outside that highlands bar through a taxi window it was a kiss, and maybe it had been all the bourbon, or maybe it was the residue of the romance of their youth, or maybe it was just her vicious need to be again, and nights that turned into weeks without thinking it was making out at every red light, and concerts with his fingers strumming against her thighs, and her car, and that alley, and enough dark to keep all the realities at bay and for just a while be, to be again.

‘fuck you man, you don’t know anything about her’.

That wasn’t true. He shrugged. After he suspected it wasn’t about that. John was reasonable enough to understand his complicitness in that moment, drunk and fool, but reasonable, at least he remember him as such. No, he realized this was about something different, this was about January some time later, when the girls in the bar he worked at told him that there was some girl here, and it was about that the near sheer slip under the black crocheted dress, and the fingers that lingered at the stem of the martini glass she had propped herself up on, and the freckles and the curls of her hair, she had worn when she was young. And it was about the silence afterwards, when he never heard from her again.

‘fuck you man,’ john repeated, ‘you had no right’

‘John, you think I didn’t know she was going to go back to you? That you wouldn’t get back together? You’re her husband. You’re a family. She was never going to be with me. I knew that.  Let it go.’

‘Then why’d you do it?’

Without thinking he responded, ‘you might have loved her best, but I loved her first’.

John swung and he batted it away, john was drunker than even his gait had let on, he had him by the front of the shirt, and with a push put him against the wall.

He wasn’t angry, in that moment he felt again the acuteness of that silence. You can’t fill someone up without emptying youself, and that there was going to be a part of him, always in that grey space with her, on top of the sheets, entwined in her quiet breathing and the smooth brown lengths of her skin, caught up in the fragile moment, twittering at the most fragile part, the end, moments before the collapse. He was suddenly tired. And he let john’s shirt go.

‘Go home to your wife john. She loves you, which is more than you deserve, so it needs to be enough.’ For the briefest moments he could taste her again in his mouth ‘it has to be enough.’

mostly defeated

she was sitting under the pergola, knees pulled up and under a long spring bud dress. unadorned, hair falling in long straight sheets of brown. her arms- thin- wrapped around her legs, bared toes poked out from underneath.
he knew he would find her here, adrift the potted plants and the aching afternoon flowers. the grey drone of clouds, and the wind that dashed off the shore now slowed to a comfortable amble by the time it reached his yard- made being outside possible, even pleasant.
he called out her name as he approached, but she didn't turn to see him till he had come closer. her brown eyes were unhemmed and her lips tinged with red, her sleepy slow smile confirmed the bottle that companioned her on the bench, mostly defeated.
he pulled off his silk tie, tossed it casually on the glass end table- christened with yellow pollen- and undid a few of the buttons of his shirt. he then unplugged the glass decanter and poured warm, strong smelling bourbon into a previously abandoned glass. sat down, pulled off his shoes and socks, flexed his toes.
when he inquired how she was, she replied with a shrug of her slight shoulders and so they sat there for some time, saying nothing at all. after awhile though, she stood and walked out into the grass, dragging the wine bottle behind her.
'what did you do today?' he asked.
she was staring into, or through, the blooming hibiscus- their shivering red petals.
'people drive too fast in this neighborhood.' she answered, he threw an arm over the back of the bench and didn't respond. she turned to him, caught him looking at her and carried on, 'did you know sandhill cranes mate for life?'
'no, i didn't know that.'
'i went for a walk this morning...' she trailed off.
'did you take the wine with you?' he knew she had, but the smile she gave him surprised him- implish and young, it belonged to a girl who had not been spending her days in his yard.
he watched it evaporated before his eyes as she continued, ' somebody hit a sandhill crane. i saw it.'
'did they stop?'
'no, i saw it afterwards laying on the asphalt.'
'oh' he winced.
'but that wasn't the worst part.' she paused, and a pop of wind sent all the leaves into a brief crescendo. he didn't ask, just waited for the wind, or whatever had given her pause to subside. 'what was worse  was that i saw its mate standing there beside it. it was just looking down at it. it was just so awful.'
'are you okay?'
she walked around in a small circle, the green blades of the saint augustine grass shooting up through her toes. the wind pulled at her dress, her lithe form revealed- and he remembered all at once how young she was.
'i just sorta stood there and wondered...' trailing off again.
'wondering what?' she turned and faced away from him.
'what it was feeling.'
he drank from his glass and then offered up 'despair i would imagine.'
'no i don't think so.' he only half heard her-he was looking at how the whole yard was in movement- even if only recognizable in the smallest of ways, everything seemed to sway to the beat of some invisible force except for her- amidst it all she seemed so becalmed. 'no i think it was feeling something worse than despair.'
'worse than despair?' he then asked, 'what could be worse than despair?'
she turned back to him and with wine stained lips she answered.
'confusion.'

the cerulean dress

they were at, and of, the beach. she with her tanned skin in shades of wet sand, and he with his heavy lidded sleepy blue eyes of seaside rainstorm skies. they had been hiding together, away, and apart for a tumbling collection of days. everything in this temporary place felt like the linen curtains that were pulled out of the window by forces that seemed more pressing than wind, they flailed there white and sweet.
she hadn't know that she had been saving the cerulean dress until she realized he was leaving - it then occurred to her, laying out on the bed that she had. she pulled it on, in a movement without thought - that she would have believed bereft of grace- except without her expecting it he had informed her of quite the opposite a day or two before- and suddenly felt like a silent spectacle of femininity.
'everything you do,' he had said, 'motion and movement, is beautiful...'
she had not blushed, they had been too exposed these last few days for that. but she felt some part of her, inanimate recoil from his words. hours later she finally recognized it, it had been disbelief. no words could shake her conscious critique that her arms, reaching back and behind to work the three buttons, could be anything other than awkward and clumsy, but the look she received to the shake of her head, the messy toss of her long hair - several shades darker than sepia - left her startled, it was confident and unargumentative, and suddenly she was sure no matter how much she felt the opposite, that she was wrong.
the last button done. out through the door, left ever open, a few steps to the sand, then to the berm where everyday but one she had waited for him. she knew he would be in the water, to the waist of his green shorts, or drifting off between the sand bars nearly swallowed by the waters. it was not because she could not swim, or had no love for the sea- for she had, that she waited. and she had been part of the sea long before the morning after the third night when she had awoken and found that she was now part of him.
but because he had only asked her to come once.
only a few days old, the memory of their brief tryst in the sea was already bleeding. she didn't know if it had been the sensory confusion of the rain and the water, or the bizarre sensation of being in the water in her ankle length skirt that had rendered the memory so difficult. she hadn't really swum though, or even clung to him really, rather she had let him just hold her- a rarity- his hands holding her steady at the waist as around her the waves had pushed past to collapse, while the sky surrendered, like an eclipse, its liturgy of air. she couldn't say now how long they had been there in the seastorm, or why then he had pulled her out with him on that day. but without being able to understand or explain it she knew that it would not happen again.
he was out there alone now as he seemed to prefer it. the wind moved as if to say something through the rattling of the surrounding sea oats. she thought then that the sea was his, and would now always be. she did not know what was hers, she would find it some day- though not with him. the only thing she would ever share with him was that day, and all these other days, and that room, and the cerulean dress she had saved to wear as she said goodbye.

mark kozelek

there is a space in my heart for mark kozelek from which he will never be dethroned. he does not deserve it, but that is because no one ever really deserves our love. there can be too many reasons one does not deserve our love though. the counter intuitive mathematics of deserving and love should not perplex anyone, there's no sense to love at all.
to see someone perform who has always been a spectre, the present unpresent to use a theological turn of phrase, is difficult. people can not live up to our ideas about them- because ideas are bound to nothing, where as people are bound completely to their limitations, person and/or circumstantial.
no concert by mark kozelek could eve be good enough, for he can only be himself, and he can only be himself for the time allotted. he could never be the mark kozelek that I loved, for that mark kozelek is not real- and he could never be himself, or as I wanted him to be, long enough, for he is a part of the life I have lived and will live- I want him to play forever.
this is not even to speak of the issue of song choices. some of my favourite songs of his are more than 20 years old- he could not play his catalogue, time would never permit. and to demand that he play older stuff as opposed to his newer work is to reject him as a person all together, it makes me no different than the drunken heckler who screams at the besieged rundown bar piano man "play it again!" which would be a disservice to him as the adored and me as the adorer. how many hundred times has he played 'katy song' or 'japanese to english'? it seems only reasonable that he is sick of playing those songs - I can only listen to them still because my affection for them is entirely unreasonable.
the out come of a concert like the on I saw on Saturday seems to be predestined to be disappointment. frustrating since it never could have been avoided, not even by that figure around which the experience of the concert fixates. (I will admit that I am left in a complete state of doubt as to who that figure is: mark kozelek or myself)
mark kozelek has received some praise, and a great deal more criticism in these last days. his style has long since drifted away from the crushing, over-dramatic, yet inexplicably lovely, 'slowcore' style that brought him his early, relative, success. his lyrics no longer seem like pages of some manic journal shared with the listener because mark kozelek is compelled through/by guilt or love or madness to disclose. no his lyrics now read more like clippings from newspapers or writings from napkins composed on a porch. the guitar work is more artistic in his new work, and the lyrics are more mundane.
in one of his many rambling, entertaining talks between songs he explains to the crowd that the reason he does not have a fancy new smart phone is because he wanted to 'be able to do this'. it is his segue in his song 'alesund'- which is beautiful and haunting and so difficult to perform that one can see him have to focus the whole of his will and ability to perform it. it is more than enjoyable, and would leave me stunned except every song is performed in the space that the song he did not perform could have occupied. if I am not shaken and fulfilled, it is not fault of his. and while my inclinations are to self incriminate - I can not quite say that it is mine either.
going to see a concert is a strange thing in conception, especially if the musician or band one goes to see is not the type to put on a spectacle/ why go? the best the musician can hope to accomplish is to sound like they did on their album, perfect, and I am not trying to belittle the ability to replicate one's album caliber music - anyone who fancies concerts will confirm it is no small or common feat.
so why did I go? knowing I would be disappointed, knowing he would play few if any of my favourite songs, knowing I would not get a spectacle. was it enough to have some fragile temporary experience with mark kozelek for myself? is the concert experience so selfish in its roots as that?
though his music has changed over the years, mark kozelek music has always spoken to me. he words seemed, insanely or childishly, to be expression of things I felt. (I will admit there is a confusing element to that idea, seeing that I almost always discover mark kozeleks music after its heyday, and due to the fact that he is 14 years my senior) he seemed always to be saying what I could not, or perhaps closer to the truth dared not.
maybe in that is a little truth, that I went to see mark kozelek so that I could hear him sing about the things I did not know I already knew.
he was halfway into a strikingly different version of 'richard ramirez', carrying the emotion of the song entirely with his voice; which I sometimes wonder if he has forgotten has always been his best instrument- when I found myself crying. not loudly, or in the guiltless way I often cry at the end of good movies- but in the revelationary way. for reasons  I can not finger I realized something in the midst of that song.
mark kozelek has no idea what it is all about.
his lyrics and music have change not as some artistic response to changing cultural stimuli but because that part of him that used to write lines like 'we walked down the hill/I feel the coming on/ of fading sun/ and I know for sure/ that you'll never be the one/ its the forbidden moment that we live/ that fires our sad escape/ and holds passion more than words can say'. he doesn't see the world that way anymore - pushed by mystic and unimaginable forces. now he writes lines such as 'We didn't have very much to say/ she said that she'd come from some other place/ a town called Troyskirt, maybe Troysworth/ i was pretty distracted packing my stuff/ but I did make a point to ask her to stay/ but she said she had friends that she had to go see'. he is not struggling to make sense of the failed relationships and the fading loves, the seemingly unavoidable movement from love to pain, and back again. now he sees relationships as failed because that's the way the world is- there is no mystery to the 'why'- there only is. love fades because everything fades. and the lines or transitions between love and pain are so temporary on the larger scale and so subjective that differentiating between them at all is not some great human endeavor but a silly statement on one's current location.
mark kozelek has let it go. he's living and writing about the mundanity of experience - and if it sounds magical as it does at the end of 'I know its pathetic by that was the greatest night of my life' - its just coincidental.
I cried, because I missed my mark kozelek, and because I missed myself that could sing in off key affirmation of shared emotion and desperation about such things. I cant want him to be who he was anymore than I can hope to retain those things  no one seems to retain. and while I cant be indignant about it, I suppose I don't either have to be happy about it either.
So I cried because mark kozelek has no idea what life is about.
and neither do it.

termini

i went down, as i often did on tuesdays, to stare at the straight lines of the loading and unloading trains. i liked the structure of it- those metal almost cylinders, static and silent and the cables of human movement that morphed from constrained pulsing order to chaotic absurd throngs in a moment, then back again. i had been in rome for months, languished in the august heat in sync with the whole city that seemed to capitulate to the weight of the weather and the oppressive invasion of tourists. but the cobblestones, and the baroque facades had become common place, just the week before i had been walking down via napoleone III turned left unto via gioberti cut through a heard of hissing and wailing stagnated cars and passed as disinterested as a spring stream right past the santa maria maggiore. termini was my wistful port, a cliff from which i could stare out at leaving made manifest.

the suddenly peeling away from a view of disembarking I saw a woman who looked like, exactly, a girl i had once known. i remembered that moment we shared, as she unwound her ḥijāb, how her the pristine cream neck revealed itself like one of solomon’s towers. it was a frozen moment for me, that never seemed to fray with the passing of time, the act of her unwinding the surprising lengths of her dark curly hair. and all the skin and the shed sanctity less revealing than her eyes, and the tremble in her voice as she asked me a question.  it was her, i was sure of it, though i knew it was not. the heart shape of her face, and the fierce aura that exuded from her seemed exact. and so my mind and heart could not reconcile, and as i called out her name, in a choked voice, she didn’t bother to turn to it. it wasn’t her name, it was august in rome and I was imagining things.

mem or ee

the fall is for brooding, open highways, and the ghosts of the ever lingering lovers so far gone the memory cant recall, cant conjure them on command, like the known sign no longer visible in his for reflecting rearview mirror. beyond the hills infront, just like those heinous empty nebraska plains, recently passed through, what exists i can not know or remember only imagine. i sat on my front bumper at an all too familiar gas station - as he had so many times been - between my past and the unpossessed future. only the past is mine.
'how can you do that - walk backwards through life?'
he, or i, the subjects - life or story? the direction you view, i look, everything is twisted fact or fiction, twisted and ravelled and ravelling around each other, around themselves. 'theres nothing back there for you,'  he thinks she is disgusted, she hides it well, but i could see it, coiling behind the veil of her eyes.
in his head or out loud i say, 'theres nothing back there at all.'
'what?'
'things imply substance, and theres not, theres no past beyond the stories and the corner crouching ghosts,' she has been sick of this, is and was, and will be even later when they, we, have stopped talking. i know she isnt here, thats just a memastory, this is just the haunt, the milemarker. 357 where the light swung left to right no matter which direction one faces, for the light was always just remembered even when he was living in it. i thought it looked like silent blonde streamers, fragile and resolved.
white washed blue eyes and her fingers at his wrist, checking for his resting pulse. 'i cant feel it' from beneaht the shest she says, '.....
he remembered it as a confused sleepy wandering question, childish but then i remembered it differently something about the sound of the highway- maybe more a mocking tone. and it all seems to blur, the bedroom or a gas station in limon, colorado. was it her voice or the old mans that mocked me like pearl mocked dimsdale, 'thou wast not bold, thou wast not....'
it was a carved grey beard and the frayed cowboy hat then he recalled asking him
'where you headed?'
and before i could answer he rambled on about some place in texas, about a job or a girl or whatever it is spectres on the great american highway always find themselves crawling towards. the old man was headed some where, for there was nothing the old man told him, for him or i or he or them in this place. there was and is nothing ever here, something is always elsewhere, over there beyond the ridge, beyond the hills, the horizon until there are no more horizons - for that is what death is, the end of horizons. and living the movement through the nothings of this place, ever real, and not, he or i thought, to be confused with the nothings of the past which were not even real, to the place where one no longer look into, and through what was not towards what might be.
i think i grunted, i am sure i didn't speak.
'what about you? you headed home?' the old man couldnt have seen my licence plate.
i said no, or i dont know, or 'i dont know where home is'
most places are like most other places, from the over hang of a gas station florida isnt much different from east colorado, or alabama from virgina. go to enough places, see enough of the spectrum and the gaps between the majesty of st marks and the mundanity of your average road side diner falls away, or into itself, a place is everyplace, is no place. and like all the memories of summer days become one day of bright summer, or one bar of golden light so do all places become a, or any, gas station.
and too the voices and the people and the old man and the girl are there, saying in both voices, unique and uniform, choral and monotone the words, the question
'... where is your heart?'

Calypso (to 'nýja lagiδ')

they had been laying on the floor of her living room for hours.
suspended, inclosed by the screaming white walls and carpet.
everything was still, unadorned- except for the massively oversized mirror
that hung above her couch, framed by roughly cut cardboard.
the world had stopped for them, nothing moved.
there was only music
they spoke at times, and then went unimaginable expanses without words
he traced lines, shapes, words, sentences, secrets
with his fingers into her arms and legs
when he asked how long they had laid there
her heavily lidded eyes pulled open
draconic  and lovely and green
she answered 'always'

later like a shock.
the sun breaks. pouring in through the gossmer drapes that hang
over the rarelly openned double french doors.
the illusion of their forever trembles
in the adamant light of celestial physics.
'it's almost tomorrow' he says
'no, no' her soft pleas, 'make it stop.'
he pulls his hand through her thick hair,
newly illuminated it is a cascade of garnet and copper.
'i dont know how'
'if you just put this song on repeat.
and we dont ever go to sleep
it will stop.'
he could not help his smile, at the sleepy laze of her voice
'will it?'
'yes, just stay here with me,
in this room,
in this song,'
she says softly,
'if we dont go to sleep, it will be today forever.'