Sometimes A Story Just Needs Time
Love, like all rituals, is just a part of my practice.
The following is a short excerpt from this week’s essay. To access the full recording - please consider becoming a paying subscriber via the button below.
One day a few weeks ago I was struggling to focus. Brain skipping from one thought to the next, not quite able to land anywhere long enough to stay. A to-do list a mile long and not enough hours in any day to make a real dent. Hundreds of false starts and unfinished pieces of writing staring at me from my laptop screen.
Not that different from most days, come to think.
I decided to stop and breathe. Remembered it had been a minute since I did my morning ritual of music, cards, and movement. Just the thought made my brain settle.
Yes, I think, that is where I must always begin. With the foundation. With practice. Inside the space where mind, body, and soul come together.
I’m already working from my well-made bed—a recent, perhaps questionable, habit—so I reach to the side to choose two card decks from the precarious pile stacked on my nightstand.
One oracle deck, one tarot. Not because I believe these cards have a magical ability to predict my future. Guidance from the cards is only ever counsel from deep inside my own wisdom, after all. A gentle nudge toward the knowing of what I already know.
I used to believe otherwise, or I wanted to at least, much the same way I once chased religion for an answer I could rest inside. Now? The cards (and all the rest) are just another way to source respite from inside myself.
I move to my computer, to find the right music to backdrop the ritual. Music, for me, connects the disparates pieces of my practice into a cohesive whole. My plan is to get up and move my body, to pull some cards, to take myself outside and raise my face to the sun before continuing on with my work.
But Spotify is already strangely open to an artist that looks vaguely familiar. One I have not clicked on or typed intentionally into the search bar. The band name teases at my memory for a second before I remember. Of course, the music belongs to a love story.
Love, like the ritual of cards, is just another part of my practice.
Summer—Fall circa 2013.
This love story began with a lucky penny and grew across distance with the daily exchange of lyrics and melody. This love story rolled through my life like wildfire, delivering back every ounce of possibility my own break with integrity had years ago stolen from my grasp. This love story ultimately handed me directly into the center of the break, the most bottomless rabbit hole of depression I’ve ever had to claw myself out of.
In the span of a few seconds, my body relives the entire trajectory of that love.
I search the song list, looking for a title that feels familiar. There it is.
Rain, by Blackmill.
I press play.
There are no lyrics. Only the sort of sound that speaks of hours lost to fading light and skin against skin and the sounds of pleasure unrestrained against the deepening night. I can’t remember if she pushed me hard against that wall and kissed me of her own accord, or if I first fantasized that she did, told her so, and then later she made it my reality.
I think it was the latter. I faintly recall writing the words, crafting a story describing what I imagined happened between us while the song played.
The wall.
The kiss.
Her hands.
All that came after.
Yes, I remember now. I recorded this story, my voice creating a line of desire across miles, send the audio to her, sharing a daydream and predicting my own future, which is now my distant past.
The song plays in my current right now while I sit here on my bed, tarot decks readied for ritual. Instead, I am transported. Lost and found. I am here and also there, back then, with her. Spiraled into another lifetime, another body, another dream that could have, might have, would have been.
“You feel like beauty,” she said to me that day, as her fingers grazed the line of my spine.
Down, down, down, she went/I went/we went.
My breath is tight in my lungs. I am underwater, I am drowning, I am made liquid by desire. All I want to do is keep spiraling deeper. All I want is to keep spiraling.
All I want, all I want, all I want, is her.
When the meeting of such a stunning want is more than enough to sustain life, who on earth needs air?
“Everything whispers I love you” I said softly a little while later, sometime after we surfaced and let air once again flood our lungs.
That wasn’t my line, of course, I stole it from another poet*. But I meant it then, with all that I had.
Lovers are the best and worst kind of thieves, you know.
That’s the trick of love, you see. An entirely new invention, every time. Rare and singular. Without prior context. Fools us into imagining we are the only ones in the history of every last forever to have ever known such a staggering sort of homecoming.
The first to have tasted this opened-handed hope, to have surrendered that hope into such serendipitous grace. Love has us believing our own fairytales of never before and never again and now and now and only this right now. That in the entirety of this wide-open world nobody else has or will experience exactly this. Not quite like us.
And we are, of course, entirely right and also wholly incorrect, all at once. Language becomes inadequate here, and thus love makes plagiarists of us all—we plunder the cosmos to pirate words and music, and images that come anywhere close to capturing the complexity of this ordinary/extraordinary reality.
And so that day, with her, she collected lyrics and melody from a myriad of musicians to be the backdrop of our lovemaking, and I shamelessly borrowed a line from my favorite love poem to ground us back to earth in the after. It was the only thing that could have possibly said what I meant right then, looking into what I thought was the portal to a long and sustaining love.
And of course, I was wrong. More wrong than I could have known. That woman, she chased her own ghost right into the arms of an addiction that had way more pull than the gravity of all that desire. The drugs were a stronger magnet than all the music and borrowed lines of poetry and the gravity pull of our bodies in the dark. Stronger than any other force either of us could muster.
When I came to know the truth. When the ending was delivered. When the dreams came crashing down. I was brought to the ground. Became a keening, wailing animal, twisting in on my own denial. I wrestled hard with a reality that stood in direct opposition to the story I expected to be writing long into the future.
Nine years ago, and just a whisper of melody away—such is the memory of love.
But here is what I want to tell you now.
When that song played my body did not first relive the breaking. It returned to the moment we both spied the same lucky penny on the floor of that gay bar near a sheltered sea. To the first moment I heard the ocean floor in her voice suggesting we guard the door of the men’s room for each other instead of waiting in the long line for the ladies. It went to the longing over distance, falling asleep over FaceTime and tracing the curves of her body with my fingertip along the laptop screen. It went to those hours in her bedroom and all the ways we whispered I love you without ever saying the words.
And it went directly to the way this love story placed a new sort of forever back in my hands once again, and how that forever has never left, not once, not in all the endings and losses that have happened since.
I was surprised by this. For so long, it was the grief that held sway over this narrative. Grief had control of the mic and was determined to speak its mind.
But time softens all things, even grief, and the shards of this ending were softened by the pounding surf of my own living and by all the learning and loving I’ve done in the lifetimes and lovetimes since.
Even in a decade-old story, there are still new chapters to write. In this book, it turns out, the final chapter might be a gentle and hopeful one, after all. And this makes me so very glad I didn’t ever stop writing.
Sometimes, you see, a story just needs time.
(Stay tuned for Part Two Next Week)
Creative Sovereignty Prompt Of The Week:
If you attempt to write your way into this prompt, I’d love to hear about it in the comments below.
*Buddy Wakefield is a genius of a poet, a human who can do things to words that make no logical sense, but that land in my body as brilliance. Beyond providing me with the perfect words for post-coital bliss, he has also left me completely undone time after time. If you haven’t explored his work, please do so. You can start with the poem mentioned in this essay here.
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