Let me ramble. Lemme flow awhile here. Think of this as jazz. Discordant stacks of hot buttered Silver Dollar Wordcakes. Let me cook awhile, y'all...
Whatever diaries my wife left laying around in the beginning, I've read them. Journals. Letters from old boyfriends that seem heartfelt and sincere but also a bit twee. I wrote letters like that to her once. I haven't unearthed those yet. She might've chucked them. Hmph.
I remember writing my very first letter to her about two weeks after I'd met her. We were still out on the same tour with the band. I penned it to her while I was sat out on the pool deck of a Comfort Inn or a Shiloh Inn or some such fucking Inn in Little Rock, Arkansas. I wrote to her that they were building the Bill Clinton Library next door, because they were. I think I wrote other things too, poetic attempts. I recall something about a little bird. Maybe a bird had just landed on the iron rail nearby and I saw it as some sort of LoveSign? What a dipshit I can be.
Anyways, I remember smoking my cigs and wondering if I wrote to her honestly, with warty truth and colorful twists of language, whether that would somehow help make this lovely girl understand me more. Or contemplate me more. Or wanna visit me and spend a long dreamy weekend in bed rolling around in the take-out cartons and the dried sweat reefs and the movie listings.
Then, time rolls on.
Love is so merciless. The heart is the ultimate vessel but it gets banged up/pummeled by grenades/Carpet Bombed By Drunken Asshole Pilots Born Without Souls. Relentless barrages of nails and fangs and antlers and iron spikes are driven into your chest by the Sweet Fierce Fighters we call Love/Hope/Forever. And oh the silly heart, the tender optimist. Charred beyond recognition, still standing in the middle of the nuked out street still gripping tight to thirty melted chocolates in a box shaped like. You guessed it. A heart.
At least for a lot of us, that's how it is sometimes. The heart is the thing. Fuck the lungs. You could buy Hundred Year-Old Lungs manufactured by Marlboro Red and they could never be half as burnt up as so many trillion hearts have been at one time or another.
Even today, I wonder: how the Christ did we find each other?
How the fuck did I end up with another person? And her with me? On occasion I will see pictures of other people, couples. And I will look at them and wonder why in hell they ended up together. By that I mean, how did they find each other out in the world? And what was their first meeting like? And their courtship, if they had one?
Hey, some people are just too tired of courting after so many years in the ring.
So yeah...how does it all just happen? How does love smash into us so hard one day and not even drive off at all? Some people just meet and laugh and speak with deep gut sighs and eye flutters. They pass the pepper across the tall cafe table to the other one and that says it all. Let's move in together. They move in together.
Me and Monica sort of played it that way. But we both talk too much to even notice that someone's handing them the pepper shaker with love. We could talk birds out of the blue yonder. We could rattle our tongues until God himself rolled slow up in his pimped out Baby Blue '66 Chevelle SS and looked at us and said:
"Yo. It's all over."
We probably wouldn't stop talking. We probably wouldn't shut up when the flashes began either. Or the nuclear warheads slammed into the mountains off in the distance. Mushroom clouds, we'd chatter on, about this and that, about bullshit. Prophecy Lizards the size of Photo-Mats come tear-assin' out of hunks of street they just pushed up and crawled from: we'd yap away. Rock bands, novels, tacos, dogs, positions, conservative joy drainers, race, economy, the space program, the electric in your blood when you kiss a stranger when you're lightly buzzed.
She gets life. I saw that early on. At least, she gets it like I try and get it. And that's all I ever dreamed of finding, really.
So, we talked a lot about everything. Monica is a fabulous listener. The best I've ever encountered. I had never really had anyone listen to me before. I come from a long brash line of French and Irish screamers. We scream. We hoot our words out with oval gushes of air, like night owls. We talk over one another without even really listening to what the fuck the other person is even saying. We're somewhat rude and self-absorbed. We're a little too coked up on our own vignettes. Monica is not like that at all. She listens. Hawk ears. Hawk Lady Full Of Wine.
I don't think I have been listening as good lately. I'm tired. She's tired. It exhausting, this kid thing. Violet was cut from The Original Dew Drop. She is the freshest alive-est most explosively inimitable wonder that ever did land in our laps/emerge from our lap, but she requires vast prairies of day and night. By the time you get across one and she's asleep, there isn't much real talking/listening going on. We cross paths on the couch, clink wine glasses to the bottle but never to each other. Toasts are for a job well done and not a job that never ends.
We'll watch an episode of BLACK BOOKS and I'll be all pissing my pants with big laughter while she curls up in her area down couch. She might make popcorn and gob it with nuked Country Crock and bring it in in the big silver bowl. I will dig at it like a Neanderthal, spilling kernals and unpopped seeds down onto Milo's head under my propped up legs. She might yell at me, she might not.
Then, before long we'll cork the bottle. We'll head to bed, obliterated from another long long day. I set my phone for 6am. It comes so motherfucking fast.
I'm not too worried though. One of these evenings the whole thing will pop and I will be able to sit down with Hawk Lady Full Of Wine and tell her that I'm still into her, and her amazing mind. And her fine ass body: her galactic #!$+* and that historical $#! and those utterly magnificent $#!@. And she will listen.
Then, I will shut my trap for the first time in my life. And listen to her too.
My lady/my lass. Lemme listen to you, baby.
Wuzonyermindgurl?
She'll start talking.
A trout will swim through my eyeball. Christ. Get out, man. Seriously.
I'm trying things over here. Love Things. Adult shit.
At least let me try.