THINKING ABOUT LOVE ON A SNOWY MORNING

                          

When the first snowfall of the season hits,  we slip easily into our slankets and hot cocoa comas, which transports us, like the mountain-winding Polar Express, back to the furthermost, far-flung reaches of Memory Island, where invisible caretakers maintain the integrity and order of our childhood which, despite mature appearances, is alive and well in all of us.

The caretakers and their ancient wisdom understand the need for freedom and the desire for containment.  Our childhood gets to gambol like stallions in pastures of plenty and at day’s end, it gets tucked in beneath the feathery duvet of  fairy dust that lightly falls on our eyelids, each and every night, which causes them to flutter like the revolving, sprocketed film of an old time movie projector, as the greater power chooses just the right mind dream movie that we’ll be watching from the front row seats of our imagination.

There is radiance when the ordinary is novel.   Routine, when it becomes as rehearsed as a Soviet-trained  ballerina, becomes free flowing  and flies with grace on the tiptoes of our consciousness which slowly bends like a tall, frail weed or a woman dipped in a tango until the solid becomes fluid and fluid becomes the feelings that we sink into when we finally allow ourselves to weep at the sheerness of beauty.

When we yield and pay our due respect, color becomes music and music becomes the artist’s secular hand.  Sadness becomes rhapsodic and joy becomes a crushing blow.   

Loss becomes imperial.

And our messy saints, who prefer their beer warm and their sex cold, fling open the doors of our hearts and give us the open house, real estate agent’s tour of who we yearn to be.

This is where we go when the distant fiddles of the Irish mist, gives you no other option.

The only thing that can mute our voyage are words and so we contend with the silence until it feels as loving as the one that we miss the most.

Regret will compel you now and obedience is the only thing that will keep you tethered, like a bobbling rowboat, on rippling waves which argues with uncertainty with the unconditional shore while the snow, which continues to fall, in the other dimension, lives on, insistently, without you, as if you never existed or never will again.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     
The revelation which should never be trusted falls like forgotten phrases and missed opportunities, and lands, like sorrow, somewhere between the hairline cracks of love and death, where forgiveness feels insulting and remembering all the messy details feels like punishment.

This is the broken heart of the hereafter.

Which can only be found during the very first snow.

It’s as warm and as inviting as a steam engine furnace with its carnival barker promise of eternal love which draws you in, just like she did when she made the pitch that you didn’t listen to when she announced what the boundaries were. 

The conditions and rules for the pistols at dawn duel to come.

And instead of fleeing, you doubled down and invested everything in the sure thing that was guaranteed not to pay off.

Which leads you to this crossroads moment.

Which you would deal with, but you suddenly realize that the snow has stopped.

You have work to do.

You have to go back.

But first, you have to close up the house.

You have to do methodical inventory.

In the drafty exile of the attic.

In the soft white underbelly of the basement.

The curtains must be drawn just like at the end of any play.

And when you leave, you know that you can never turn back and look at her again.

Even when she stands at the window.

Holding a lantern.

Which makes her features as soft as the clay that she sculpts with.