To Vinegar These Grapes Must Go

There is no second life.  There is no rebirth, just as a line in the sand cannot dissuade the rising tide.  The furrow fills and the shore flattens: all is one, and slowly submerges, until the surf retreats and the unbroken beachhead of your life confronts you in its haunting singularity.  I spent twenty-five years gathering pretense to me as if the sacrosanct trappings of the human office: I must spend the rest of my years discarding them, addition by subtraction, until reduced in size but expanded by my own naked truth.

Do not put a pocketknife through your parachute’s lines for want of the ground beneath you.  You’ll get there.  Land lightly and run.

Work has become tedious, and the safety of serenity now slowly slips away.  Perhaps that was just one of those aforementioned pretensions?  Good humor has fled like a flock of nervous birds, with only a tenuous singsong promise to return.  You’re coming back, right?  We have a startling habit of assuming that our heroes and saints have deserted us, without having ever even bothered to take a look around.

Human age is a sum total. I am twenty-five, and twenty-four, and twenty-three.  Sometimes I feel all three hundred and twenty-five of my years.  Some grapes were meant to be vinegar, but vinegar is useful, too.  They told me I was enigmatic.  They said I was by turns shockingly warm and oddly intimidating.  They claimed that, somehow, I understood them better than anyone they’d ever met, even while readily admitting that they did not understand me at all.  I’m not certain I want to be a mystery anymore.

Saturday was fascinating.  We left the show and walked down the street.  We all did.  The mood was festive and the conversation self-assured.  When we sat at the bar, I realized.  I saw it.  In the frenzied contortions of the pirouetting bartenders, in the blaring music and the struggling harmony of our conversations, in the carefree wildness of the dancing and the smiling and the–just once, just tonight, maybe never again–honest love in every eye as they caught the muted light.  It was a beach crisscrossed with these arbitrary lines, demarcations created in order to make sense of my own life.  These people whom I knew danced across its entirety, stomping out those insane and useless lines with their joyous feet.  The chaos was beautiful, the entropy truthful.  I loved it.

After the show at the bar.  I’m not certain what I’m doing or why I kind of resemble a dinosaur, but that girl in the blue seems to be amused by it.

I was a fish in a prior life, but dammit, I was a dapper one.