The Lollipop Tree

Trundling, half dying of thirst and my wearied Being half slaked by its promise of release, a bosky presence answered my croaking voice remembering a memory of love aloud. The days continued; I hugged the tree; I supped from its dew. I thought then that if I left its shade, the invisible and scavenging past would have me again, defenseless. But God had given me a choice that was no choice: I had to go. And the tree followed. The tree uprooted and followed. I walked in awe of this miracle of locomotion until I saw that I  had become rooted as it once was.

And I realized that it had been waiting for me to help it walk; its dew our tears ours again.

Absentia

A somber night, neither despite nor because of the clenching swamp as aptly describing this air as it does any marshy earth.

Just is. 

A night of missing things. Some familiar squawk from above. The brawn of a red memory, all bold and leaden, dense. 

A night fading into itself, plush and deferring to a sole stream of life that began, I swear, in circles and never. 

All to say, or mean, I miss you.

Amused Fate

Roused into consciousness by the end-score of the movie I'd been watching before falling asleep, I left our bed to stumble into the washroom, then the kitchen to replenish the fluid just left behind. Snuggling back under the sheets, she suddenly spoke to me in a clear voice nonetheless senseless to me. I turned with an apology on my lips at having awakened her but before a phoneme escaped she continued speaking, eyes closed; and I realized she was having a conversation with someone in her sleep. Judging by B's calm tone and the prosaic nature of this (for me) one-sided talk, I thought her dreaming of some exchange with a colleague or acquaintance she must have had in so many words dozens of times before.

Then she suddenly peeled into laughter, that gut-deep gorgeous laugh defining mirth. I looked on, rapt. She'd pause, then laugh; pause, laugh. I could feel a smile splitting my own face. Between her amusement she said "he's going around in circles." Then she awoke abruptly into semi-consciousness, asked if I was real, said something about a zamboni; and when I kissed her supine lips, assuring her I was, she burrowed her face into the crook of my arm, promptly falling asleep again.

During the night, while we lay in bed after a madly gratifying bout of sinuous sex, idly chatting, I tried to communicate something less an assertion than an ad hoc negotiation of feelings about my passion and how to embroider it within our relationship (another passion, our passion). The essence of my message was tenuously cautionary: I want to devote my energies into this one thing; and I need her to understand that any ensuing silences or seeming indifference has nothing to do with altered devotion to us or feelings for her and everything with the obsessive singularity of thought inevitable if I'm to pursue what she has sincerely and with a love larger than I thought possible to have as mine follow my proverbial dream-need. With unwavering consistency her own response was the same: she knows, her love will not falter, nothing will be misconstrued.

Yet throughout these last few weeks, the urge to set my verbal mortar has been held in repose in deferrence to needs I assumed of this relationship; but it is my fear, not our needs, hampering me. Suspended in a state of peace and well-being with her, one eluding me since birth, an either-or position has been undergirding (and undermining) my mind: I'm either happy with her while skirting the perimeter of my past; or I plunge into it, craft it, relive misery, and let the ramifications to my behaviour pare us back into singlehood. Mere biographical experience has told me I cannot have both. Scratch that: the novelty of the situation has left me unarmed; there is no biographical experience from which to draw, no lessons, no time I can recall of peace. My hesitancy bases, then, on a pattern of life and its attendant strategies inapplicable to this one.
The closest a liberating calm and I have ever come happened when I knew Ruth, twenty-seven years, and then only in isolated pockets, those spits of time allotted between recess or in happenstance encounters around the neighbourhood; or, later, smuggled hours in the Dell Park after dusk when its sole weeping willow tree's downy tendrils muffled our lust from even the stars and keening ears of passersby. Transcendentally bubbly Ruth...

Comparisons of lovers almost never flatter by virtue of a comparison being made in the first place. One always wants to feel uniquely appreciated; this is understood, and is also the stuff of low drama set high by storytellers abiding by a script I didn't write or relate remotely to reality. Call it biological or psychological, the mind takes no situation sans referencing, even if inadequately. So while B is uniquely B, her laughter during that most honest period of time, sleep, triggered a memory of Ruth, whom I loved originally, dearly, and never again in the same way with another until now.

The same way and different:  The same way in how Ruth's soul bound with happy faith and the grace that faith bestows regardless of circumstance; different in a way that is partly owed to maturity and a greater measure of autonomy than one as a child can have; and partly from that of Brandi, the whole of her, that somehow exactly binds at every node of life to the whole of me.

And all is begun anew. Fate, it seems, foreshadows. All good books do.