This is a real war.
This is the battleground and the casualties are minutemen ticking off the clock, dying under the cutlasses, misericordes and blunt clubs of Astrid and her sister Mildred.
I watch on the sidelines, blinking in and out like a bulb on the fritz. Just tell me who wins, I say.
….
In the midst of transmitting light and morse code, I saw your face again today and it caught me in the shadow of other men’s faces. You spy. You traitor. You misremembered apparition. J’accuse! For there is a dark place you reached as well as the holy light and I touch both when I find you in these instances. And my anger transmutes to gold when I aim it at you. I become a holy alchemist when I bear this feeling, a faithful necromancer. So dead, so decayed and mouldering that even Edgar Allan would turn away from the sepulchre and seek warmer climes. If I love the dead, I still love and that muscle can strengthen instead of atrophy, and yet, the charge I get is strange, joyless, binding. I must hover over it, curse it, burnish it as it turns sepia like a failed polaroid.
I know I can give you up if I tried and so I never try. And the space you held remains.
I thank the heavens I will soon enter, if only for a time, if only for a brief gasp at 32,000 feet. They will take me away from the ground war of heart v. head. Of the threatening future versus this glittering, hallowed past. The civil conflict of possibility versus reality.
It’s starting to be a bit overmuch.
There should be this quiet room, with a little soft music, though, not white noise. Beloved music, but low, just enough to infuse the air with rhythm, a beat. Windows should be open and the sounds of life outside should entwine with this music, birdsong and car horns at a distance punctuating the phrasing. We should feel it more than know it.
You should be there. Naturally? I should be there, too. Making something, some salad dressing in a bowl. Easy, but requiring attentiveness, ratios, science, purpose. The fork would scrape in the wooden bowl as I emulsify the oil. It’d be near suppertime, but before that scramble to get everything set on the table. You’d be reading, still, in another world but contented to have your body in this one, unbothered.
It would be summer and I would have a twill dress. And there’d be enough breeze to move the fabric around my legs as I stirred in time with the music. My mind would move, seamless, from this simple task, to you, to the grand chase scene I was compiling and forming and back. I would love you and this and that without a scale for comparison.
When you ate this food, you would have the look in your eye of a traveller come home, the light of 32,000 feet distance traversed in a second, in a taste, in a gust of blackberry scented air.
