strike that

lilacs out of the dead land

Tonight after my housemate Winslow and his girlfriend Megan and I cooked and ate dinner on the porch – fresh spinach fettuccini with creamy mushroom sauce, steamed zucchini and asparagus and squash, garlic bread with more garlic than bread – I did the dishes, all of them, nearly every dish we have, so that they could get on the road, because they are staying in Olympia, because Megan has a dog and dogs can not stay in our house and Winslow wants to be with Megan. He’s moving out for this reason, which is unfortunate. He just moved in. But then he decided to be with Megan, and that’s how it is.

After college BandBoy did not want to leave New York, and part of that was that he Did Not Want To Leave New York but a bigger part was that the band he was in was in New York, and he couldn’t imagine leaving it. He couldn’t put himself first. But then the band left him, one by one, to Connecticut for med school and to Chicago for a boyfriend and to a solo career uptown, until there he was programming computers like before but without the rockstar moonlighting. Some people will never be the first to bail. I don’t know if it’s noble or tragic.

I’m trying to convince one friend, right now, to up and move to Santa Rosa from Eugene, to leave her house and her friends and bring her laptop and do it, because she is the sort of permanent breathless that comes from being in love in the spring. Salads and songs and doorways make her think of him; she is there already. And I am trying to convince another friend to have an Oxford in June, because doesn’t that sound like a thing? A delightful, low-risk, Audrey Hepburn movie type thing? Because she and a boy with an accent have been staring at each other across an ocean for six months now, and what’s the use of that? Why make things Impossible when they’re not? The world is not hurting for Impossible.

In another life I would be coming up on my first full year in Quebec, I would be speaking fluent French and heavy with pain au chocolate and doing God knows what; and in another another life I’d be in Chicago listening to folk music and maybe getting my PhD. But instead I’m in Portland, a city I like Best of All, still getting my feet beneath me and finding new places to drink too much. I haven’t found a market for my Crazy, so I’m brokering that of my friends. It’s good work if you can find it but if you do it well they leave you, and it kills me to hope so hard for it to happen.

Tonight at the bar I cranked my tall PBR can tab back and forth as always, saying the letters like I learned in summercamp, A (crank) B (crank) C (crank) to find the name of my love. And it went all the way through the alphabet, which is unusual, and landed right back around to the beginning where Disaster's letter lives. And I thought, as it weakened, that if I was gentle, if I was patient, I could engineer the letter, I could pretend that it was so. But I just let it fall off where it wanted to, one letter shy. And it’s a crappy metaphor, I know, but good enough if you’re drunk, which I am, and there’s that at least, for this end of April night of a year that keeps going like it’s going.

posted by tortaluga @ 2:13 AM