Like It Means Something

That song. Do you have that song “You can’t go home again?” She asked me with the crystal wine glass in her hand. She was drawing eyes and fire and a flower like the one on a broken wrist, and across it she had scribbled the word “POWER”. We were chewing on the words I spit out with the sounds of Our Endless Numbered Days soundtracking the moment (except without your song because it wasn’t my time), and we switched to a little DJ Shadow. “Do you want Blood on the Motorway with it?” I asked. Of course you do.

The four of us sat there, letting it wash over us like those lights bathed me in the tunnel over a year ago. “You were in the back seat with the two boys in the front… I listen when you speak” she said with a smile. What conversation there was had stopped until she with the locks that hang far down her chest mentioned the sampling of Simon and Garfunkle in the midst of this song. We smiled, breathed a little deeper. When it ended, we said somehing I don’t remember now, and I changed back to the song I’d been avoiding before.

I was trying to explain this to someone else over road-trip fettuccine the other night. I’ve gotten too old for a lot of things in these endless numbered days, and one of them seems to be this insatiabile ability to talk about mundane things with romantic excitement, and at my ripe old age of (almost) 21, I’ve all but given up on roses.  Still, I said as I took my glance briefly from the odometer, Its like a tiny blue flame – nothing you would ever rally the campus around on homecoming weekend, but something you find with a little digging, something glowing white-hot (that’s what my mother used to say about me when I was little – I was full of white-hot intensity. I’m sure at the age of 4 I had a less than complete appreciation of this concept.) It makes me cry, I laughed, like that nonchalant answer meant something meant more than flowers and babies and God’s love I (and all of that). I had this urge to flip the hour glass, my mother’s unknowingly epic gift to 501 Michigan Avenue, as I found it and pressed play.

One reached for her bag – notebooks it seemed – and the other two lay on the floor cuddling with their heads on a pink fleece pillow; I polished my silver. Like it meant something. I’d intended to take it from it from its robin’s egg blue pouch for quite some time, but I hadn’t gotten around to it until this moment where I felt the insatiable need. It was neurotic and I was well aware – I’ve know enough photographers to know when I am being noticed, but with the same sentiment I’ve begun to ignore it. The smelly pink liquid went on smoothly and took off more dirt than I could have imagined. I marveled to one with curls how black with tarnish the polishing cloth had become and she just laughed. So did I. “Oh the metaphor” she remarked, and I refused to touch it with a ten foot pole. Ask me to get back to that in ten years, I said, and I’ll have something brilliant for you.

It faded to a song of another, and each of us was in our own Sodom, South Georgia. Sleeping like buckets of snow or awake like a tree full of bees, or maybe both at once while white tongues sing God is Good. I noticed a heavier beat, rhythmic knocking, and I had the worldly thought to answer the door. Her eyes were tired but bright and young, and in waltzed visitors fresh for our entertaining. So I played the hand I know best – I smiled. We chatted about a lot of things while she held her wineglass and newly chewed monologues as a shield for them, while sheer stature served as adequate for the other. I think we’re going to make it to the weekend I said, probably laughing louder than was necessary to make my point.

And here I am. She’s asleep, they all are.  And I am alone.  There’s something about Black Sheep, and I’m looking at the clock counting the hours until tour guide training later in the morning. Like it means something.

Ask me about it in ten years.

“The only thing worse than growing up is never quite learning how.” (From a sticky-note I found unexpectedly while unpacking)

yours.Rachel