But For A Moment
Just another Tuesday in December’s darkest corridor in this ghost town.
As a kind of rebellion against the season and its haunts, new and old, JR and I meet each other at a rock show. My comrade of thirty years. I have rebelled alongside JR in countless (and/or confidential) times and places. It is December of 2024 and we’re going to breathe in the unvarnished sound of a band she would have discovered first if she hadn’t vanished.
Standing next to JR, who rode with me through the nightmare marathon of days in 2004, cues the internal pull. The music she would have almost angrily loved starting to compose the crowd. All this prepares some ground, as it were, under my ribs, for another visit.
The kiss at the curb, the flash of her eyes, then into the taxi and Gone. For good, as it turned out. As parts of me knew it would be. But that evening, she was just gone through the double doors of another club on this hill, leaving another show, another band, on another Tuesday in December. I have parts that plot my susceptibility to such echoes. Parts that scheme toward remembrance’s sublime sorrow. It’s bursting into my veins, like her junk did, caging some measure of her pain. For just a little while.
But, this time, here’s what happens: I stand washed in lyrics and chords wrenched from deep inside the artists, and I am completely alone now. No brother HL to stand me up. No brother AM to slap my back or get me another Jack. And brother JR, though he is a few feet away, is living his own incarnation. Striding his own path and tending wounds all his own.
The breath-seizing swell of Dass Hymn from the stage, voices raised like precise thunder, the kaleidoscope stage lights merging like something brand new and very old at once is rising. Like the full heft of my love for her sung, full throated, directly into my body.
I had to write our story, hers and mine, alone in a freezing cabin in Vermont four weeks after she went. But her Missing days, the flaring of that wound, and the wild hunt we launched in the twisted streets, and then the Finding of her discarded body in an alley, that marked all four of us.
That wrought a singular, shared carnage in all four of the young men we were then. I thought it had lashed us tightly together; I thought she had.
But this time, I see that it has just been me. My insistence only in wrecking myself in ritual for nineteen December 29ths, haunting that alley with whiskey and Tom Waits and a bar-top letter written to burn. The fumble toward honoring her. Or us. Or something.
I tried to claw the other three back into that alley. Let’s party with her, in the best times, just tonight. Let’s do the hard living delights and sneer at attendant hazards. Let’s open ourselves wide to pain.
Later, I wrangled other loved ones, too, scrabbling for accompaniment as the slam of the door kept echoing. Her, gone in a clap of pink vapor. My need grew maudlin and unwelcome and typical of the unstable streaks some people expect from me. And grasping at others was unkind, unethical even.
I didn’t leave the alley where she was found until I was forty-five. And only by way of surrendering to sacred medicine’s harrowing odysseys inward, with the right healer holding me. Those trips cost me, even as they may have saved me. I left the alley for my unwieldly, elliptical path of healing, stewarded by healer-women who gave me grace and strength I didn’t know I deserved. And I left the alley arm in arm with a woman who loves me as hard as she did.
But tonight, when the band raises the acapella, shuddering hymn, telling of what it is to walk your own Incarnation, I slip some of gravity’s chains. My blood laces with champagne bubbles, goosebumps wrap me. I try not to fall when my eyes close, try not to weep when they open, and make it through that song still incarnated, it seems, for better or for worse.
I’ve been gifted something new as the song fades: without bitterness, with some kind of warmth, actually, I find I do not—that I cannot—care at all about strangers’ unease about my trip inside, weeping and grinning alone in a tight crowd. I am claiming this lonesomeness. The pleas to do so fell on ears plugged by desperation for accompaniment, and then by bitter, stubborn solitude. For almost twenty years, I believed that I was claiming the lonesomeness. I was not.
This year, I have been praying, among her talismans and smoke, asking her to swing through, speak to me, at least toss me a fucking bone, is how I put it. I was pissed that I had to do 2024 without her.
Of course she shows up, on her own time and terms, as always. And as the charge of the music arcs, I feel what I felt when we kissed hard on Jersey rooftops, seeing five bridges, when she said some things that I’ve never forgotten. I feel what I felt when she twisted the volume and pinned the accelerator, racing dusk and thunderheads through the nights of Oklahoma or Nebraska or California, and I placed one hand over hers on the gearshift, our other hands smoking.
She leaned over the wheel, like she was ready to missile through the windshield, as if nothing whatsoever in this broken world could stop us. She leaned forward like she was imagining taking flight. Like me, she was crackling with desire that had no name. Maybe one silver tear was tracking toward her painted lips, perfect teeth, trademark sneer. So I gripped her hand harder, we dropped the knob to fourth and slammed back in our seats, losing the cigarettes to the rush of air, embers branding the darkness behind like our own tiny meteors.
And she swerved, straightened, and laughed.
Oh, fuck. I really miss her.
And I can do it alone.
PS: Yup, I am still writing about you. Fuck off, Love.