I am, of course, the one to call you at two in the morning; after all, you call me at eight to remind me how the sun rises, but I'll always be that person in your life studiously contemplating the past in the middle of the night so the rest of us can go on living the lives we seem ascribed to by fate. I was thinking of you earlier today while driving and I remembered another time I had been driving to see you to resume, if only briefly, the mantle of a lover. It seemed to me then I had always been driving to see you, that there was no moment before or after, but always the feeling of being somewhere in the vague, not too distant past, and that I would continue driving forever thinking of you. It seems absurd to me now, since I am obviously not driving to see you, but I am worried that we're stranded in the present and that we'll never reach the future or be able to turn around and find our way back. I'm afraid the past is lost to me now, and I with it. "Omnia mutantur; nihil interit," says Ovid: All things change; nothing dies. I wonder if that's true, or if he said it to comfort himself and ally his fears. There's so much in this world, and God knows what beyond; it seems impossible to me something shouldn't be lost.
I wonder if I'm not telling you this at two in the morning because I feel the need to tell you all the things I could never find the words for, or if there isn't something else I'm trying to say, but still don't know how to go about it. We had a great run at it –life, I mean. I remember feeling both wonderful, and awful; we loved each other and despised ourselves. I suppose that's the way it goes –life, I mean. I've done some bad things in my life…and I've done some good things, too, but sometimes I can't separate the two. In the end they'll say: "He wasn't a good man, but he wasn't a bad man, either." He, of course, is the one who calls you at two in the morning from a pay phone just off the highway somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Without fail, just when you had almost forgotten him, or just when you had finally slipped off to sleep, he shows up at two in the morning. And when the phone rings at this ungodly hour, when you're pulled from the bliss of sleep, you can count on it being one of two things: either someone you know has just died, or it's just me calling you at two in the morning, drunk bemoaning the fate of the world and the state of my soul.
“All roads lead to Rome,” they say, but the way it looks to me right now, all roads lead to Hell -maybe there’s no difference. Besides, there are no roads to Heaven, only imagined paths through the clouds that trail off into nothing. There is only tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow…maybe a hundred days before it’s all over. Maybe I’m already half way there, maybe less. Maybe I’m still driving to see you, or else we’ve already parted ways and I’m off to some further destination. Time is an enemy we covet, hold close to our hearts when there’s nothing under our feet and only a cold, night sky and an infinity above our heads.
I have a feeling this intermission is almost over, that a new chapter is eager to begin but I linger on a handful of moments…the way your eyes stared back into mine, the softness of your lips, the way your hair would catch on a few day’s stubble as you turned your head into the crook of my arm before falling asleep. There are more, perhaps a thousand or so, or only a handful; I’m not sure anymore. Maybe I never was. Over time, all their faces blur into one another and I can’t tell them apart. They become one face, with one set of eyes staring back into mine, one mouth from which one voice calls out my name. I remember all of their birthdays, the way they make love each separately their own special way, but I can’t remember exactly how one led to another, how one lover became another and one memory led to another memory.
Memories are so many pockets of change, so many pennies for your thoughts. I’m gathering them up, saving them for later I suppose. I keep them in a jar on a shelf where they are gathering dust and forgetfulness. But there is a danger to collecting all your memories like so many pennies in a jar and I watch as it falls off the shelf and all those practically worthless coins and pieces of glass shatter across the floor. As a whole, they had weight, substance –alone, they are just so many fragments of memory, single moments taken out of context; walking arm in arm down the street trying to chase the cold and the blues away; limbs entwined in a gentle, violent dance of love and lust frantically trying to bridge the distance between hearts; final pleading looks into eyes so familiar, yet strange and foreign before walking away into the future.
A penny for my thoughts hiding in a corner of the room, reminding me of the day we drove to the ocean to watch wave after wave pound the shore until it was too cold and dark to stay longer, though we did. I found this one in Half-Moon Bay after making love to you in the sand beneath the stars, watching you later run down the beach naked and alive and happy. This one from 1987, discolored by so many remembrances we found in the gutter off Valencia while the Mexicans walked along in their Sunday best towing three or four children to or from church or the taqueria. I found this memory casually discarded by some errant hand at your feet when you picked me up from the train station and we had not seen each other for a year. This one we found in North Beach while the ghosts of so many failed writers and beatniks flitted about on the winds of Time, marginalized by the very culture they had rebuked; now just translucent stereotypes, caricatures of what they had espoused.
There are so many memories, so many pennies for all those thoughts. We think they have value, still deserve to be remembered so we save them for later and fill jars up with parts of our lives to be put on a shelf and taken down occasionally and sifted through. We are quietly marching down the hallway of History towards the altar of our discontents, never realizing the futility of our lives. We are being groomed for something, and sometimes I have a sickening intuition of just what –the future perhaps.
There are moments when the innocence of my feelings runs against the grain of my being, and I wonder how I acquired this hard shell, this bright, burning cynicism. Life seems to me to be a series of interludes from birth to death –the first labored gasps of air in a newborn’s lungs fresh from the warmth of the womb, to the cold, sterile air of the cancer ward where so many breathe their last, labored breaths before passing away into the unknown, that undiscovered country from which we all struggle against with so many futile labors. I suppose I am still driving towards something, though I don’t know what –maybe the chance to write my own ending.
