A Long December

… and there’s reason to believe, maybe this year will be better than the last…

This morning I am just done with the fourth playing of this song.  I watch the video every new years, and in the name of being transparent and not afraid to be real in front of you, tonight/this morning I shall explain why.

You don’t meet singers, not really.  They graze your life with a glancing blow, a chunk of soul chips off for you to see, and you say to yourself, that singer/writer/performer seems like he really knows me- but it’s just that you never know yourself.

“Smell of hospitals in winter, and the feeling that it’s all a lot of oysters-but no pearls…
“When all at once you look across a crowded room and see the way that light attaches to a girl…”

Sad thing is, no one can look at that chunk of soul of yours and say, “Yes, that’s a part I knew”, or, “I see where that fit in.”  Pictures hung on trees, thrown in the air, dissolving slowly in the water.  But where she was attached to you, no one sees anymore.  Why does it leave such a chunk missing from you, year after year?  And if you cannot answer, for sure no one else can.

Who was she?  Does it matter?  I knew her little better than you do.  But she was real, she could talk and touch and care, and her mind lived in a miasma that made her unsure of that very fact.  So, I guess at some level, I do this every year so that someone remembers she was real, and lived, and mattered- even if she doesn’t anymore.

“My problem is, that I have no walls.”  Doesn’t seem like a big deal- until you know someone, and can see what that phrase means to them.  No black and white, no reality set in stone.  Just the sun always coming back up and whatever thought floats past your minds eye at the moment.  That was Darla.

“I guess the winter makes you laugh a little slower, makes you talk a little lower, about the things you could not show her…”

Life doesn’t wait for those stuck in amber, sinking into tar pits- or wedged between verses of a song.  Maybe I do this to convince myself that I threw a line to someone with no means to catch it, because it was all I could do.  What could I do?  What would you do?  You move on, and watch the calendar slip remorselessly by, year after year.

“..and it’s been a long December, and there’s reason to believe, maybe this year will be better than the last… I can’t remember all the times I’ve tried to tell myself to hold on to these moments as they pass..”

I’m not sad, not really.  I don’t blame myself.  In a way, it’s appreciation of what I have and others do not.  It’s that no matter what happened to her, in my memory she did not slip through the cracks, and knowing it could not possibly matter to her.  It’s the calendar remorselessly slipping by.

“I can’t remember the last thing that was said as you were leaving, and the days go by so fast…”

Now, you know.  Not the facts, but the important things.  No lies. nothing to hide from stranger’s eyes.  Just me, holding a piece of soul shaped like a picture that I throw up into the air once a year, wondering if anyone will see it and care where it fits.