Postcards

You know, you can take your toe, and draw a line in the sand, and you can dare whoever you damn well please to step over it. You can be as strong, and as willful, and as smart, and as beautiful as anything that ever walked this December beach. But in spite of your best efforts, in spite of your skillful designs, and in spite of your better judgement, there's a salty ocean wave who never even notices as she wipes the best of your intentions out into that gray ocean.

I know that you know. You know what it's like to create something - something that comes from all the way inside you. And you know that you do what you do because if you didn't you would simply die, and that you have to do it whether anyone ever even notices your efforts or not.

And ninety-nine times out of a hundred they don't. The crowds browse past without even stopping to look. Or sometimes one will stop and leaf through for a bit, but her eyes give away how your vision never quite gets there for her. And, really, that's okay.

So in that one instant when that one in a hundred not only happens to walk past but stops and lingers, and when in that stranger's eyes you see your own reflection - and you watch her looking at a little piece of her own life through the words that you wrote - that's the one little moment you grab and try and hang onto for dear life.

The past can be a hard thing to get away from. There aren't any things I'm really ashamed of, but I guess there are a few that I wouldn't mind just forgetting. Things that I wish were out of my sight. Sometimes I think I wish I could just get in this old station wagon, drive far away, and not have to think about some of those ghosts.

But the past has got a pretty fast car. It's got one of those big old buicks with a great big engine that gets about eleven miles to the gallon. So while it's next to impossible to outrun the past, I'm hoping that the next time she has to stop for gas, I can sneak away down a side road somewhere and find a little peace.

Letters to the last occupant (1985) from a social service agency. Needing more information about the relationship. You can't adopt Tiffany unless you give them more information. They need a statement from her mother (who you seem to be living with). Or her father. Or various people. There are Tiffany's school notebooks, a handbook for parents of special education students. Forms, forms, and more forms. For lots of things. Tiffany's small mattress lies molding and soggy on the floor of a small room off the kitchen. Her toys are in the living room, her bike's out back.

Did the love you felt for Tiffany make a difference? To her? To you? What happened to all of you? Where did you go when you left here? Did things get better? Or worse? She'd be in her mid-twenties now. What's her life like? And how did the time she spent living here on this side of this North Carolina mountain change her?

In a valley nestled between ancient mountains, cars drive up and down this two lane blacktop, largely unaware of the river meandering its way downstream next to the road. Most drivers pay little attention to where the river came from, where it's going, or what's carried along in its chilly currents.

I slow the station wagon down, pulling off next to a rusting steel-truss bridge. Getting out and walking through knee-deep weeds down to the bank, I stare at the water, watching a failed relationship float downstream. It flows over forgotten ambition, swirls through eddies of misunderstanding, gets caught on a broken promise, which in turn is hung up on a little white lie, which has gotten stuck on an infidelity sticking out of the slow moving water, all of which are stuck in the mud of centuries-old mountains, washed long ago into this riverbed.

I see myself floating down this river too, flowing unwittingly into this confederacy of abandonment.

That guitar player up on the stage knows things about me. Out loud, he sings songs about snow falling on a Vermont landscape, but when I catch his eye (which is surprisingly easy to do), I can see that he knows all kinds of truths about me. "I know why you're wearing that outfit," his eyes say to me alone. Other people hear metaphors about heavy snow bending white pine branches, but the words that go into my ear are "don't kid yourself into thinking that your obsessions are important". The chorus (that seems like it repeats a dozen times, and will linger in my head in the weeks to come) keeps singing, "you went and threw it all away just because you couldn't handle it?"