Love Me Tonight

Sometimes it all hits at once, the history of the world and humankind. It builds up over time, laying down easy; deep fleeting thoughts, like looking down while leaping over a bottomless fissure in the earth. There’s the thrill of leaping and never mind what you saw.

Then it all comes, too much of it has accrued over time, and everywhere you look there’s some reminder of it. I’m in a black mood tonight, and I’ve put off writing for fear that I’ll scare my mother. But here I am. I’ve been circling the corral all day and there’s no room to gallop. So I thump at the keyboard.

Every living creature on Earth dies alone. It was spoken in a movie by the actor Jake Gyllenhaal, who also played one of the cowboys in the film of Brokeback Mountain. I finished the Annie Proulx collection tonight with that short story. I sat at the table alone, eating and reading, and when the end came, and all that hurt and loss, I was thinking of my own life and the people I’ll lose and the chances I’ll miss and the stupid mistakes I’ll make forever, just for being human and being part of the whole mess.

I sat in the park today and people kept walking by, the same people walking in circles. There was birdsong and sunshine. There always is. And all I thought was how every living person will suffer death, inexpressible pain, unknowable because it belongs to someone else, someone who can’t speak for it. And I wondered if the real reason we fight terrible things like torture and genocide is because we’re thinking of ourselves and when our time comes. I don’t want to go, and if I have to go, God, let it be on a piece of pecan pie my old toothless mouth didn’t have the strength to chew.

I love my girl something awful, her life is matched with mine, and everything I’ve experienced in the last few seasons has been hers, too. It’s harder than anything to love somebody, because they’ll only disappoint you. You open your heart wider and wider for a better rush of that heat, but it leaves you exposed to the sting. I’ve been hurt and I’ve made her hurt, and on those days, you wish you could just sleep through the next bit and wake up clean. Love is love, and it doesn’t matter how much you get on each other’s nerves, you’ll always have that tenderness of feeling. But there’s two meanings of tenderness, and sometimes you only feel the vulnerability.

It was a big family I left behind, and I don’t know anymore how to do that. When I was a kid, I wanted some new kind of life, but now I miss my folks. How do you leave the eight closest people you’ll ever have? We’re scattered to the wind now, spiderlings who ate up their mother and found other nests. I’m terribly old-fashioned, but I wonder if it wasn’t better when people just stayed in their hometowns, close to their kin, and built up a clan and a village and a world. It’s probably been better for world peace that so many of us are migratory instead of territorial. Anyway, my hometown wasn’t anything special to me, but I’ve got a sister in the south trying to import us down there. If I could have anything now, it would be a regular Sunday lunch with my family and friends.

I’m in France, but I’m a stay-at-home traveler. I don’t know the language well enough to engage the locals. I can’t try the local cuisine, because it’s too fleshy and, anyway, I think they execute vegans here for making a mockery of the good things in life. (Wasn’t Joan of Arc a vegetarian?) I’m too caught up in trying to be some kind of somebody to consider this a vacation. We need to take a daytrip soon, because I might as well be in Staten Island, and at least there I would have my baby brother to eat vegan duck a l’orange with.

(Mama, don’t worry, I’m only moody and I miss you. I really am having a terrific time and work is progressing. Love you.)