Prose | Poetry | Songs | Grief | Life
My Other Loneliness
For all those who lost loved ones too early
Either she will leave, or I will. Priests, as fat as fish, marry you, but marriage is an incomplete education.
Before she came, I wrote rhymes in the privacy of moonlight — the writings of a young man going nowhere, tormented, full of passion, seeking different beds in different rooms, owning a youthful authority. How little women cared, taking advantage of a young man’s weakness, and he of theirs. It was the disgusting aftermath of never finding love; the stinking early morning mouths, the bloodshot eyes, or the semen-stained sheets.
I was twenty-two when I met Morrison, then still a pilot trying to become a songwriter. I never understood Morrison the musician, and was even more confused by Morrison the songwriter. He was an untidy man who threw words at a song, only to find in the recording studio there were no understandable words, just musical chaos, a story about a man standing in a garden.
When I came home, I was that man. I remember, too, the morning she arrived, the July sun spreading across the Scottish hillsides. I had only my idiot dreams, still intact and flowering. It was the day my heart’s door opened and, in the days following, I was content to stretch out on pallets of straw, beguiled by the sound of Morrison’s impossibly beautiful voice. He didn’t need words, only to rearrange the chaos.
I might have been no more than a castaway, adrift on a metaphysical pond of hope. Instead, staid by an avalanche of warmth and closeness, I became unclothed of lustful distractions, the pedantic country schoolboy left behind, changed by the coming of love, dressed in tenacity, finding a rigorous purpose, romantic seriousness, strength, and safe in the secure warmth of love’s confines that opened up on the spoils of long walks, misty rains, castle walls, and quiet evenings of powdery blackness, lit by the crackle of a rosy fire on a beach.
You remember her, don’t you? That day when love came into your life, dressed in red, flirting with your needs and desires? Make out of anything the stuff of fortunes and dreams; you are always going to need them if you’re to keep love’s breath smelling sweet. Don’t dawdle in clouds or lie down on beds believing that time is on your side.
It isn’t.
One day, sooner or later, we are stripped of love’s clothing. There is no understanding. There is only acceptance.
In a week, she’ll leave me again.
