Tomorrow and Even Better Days
One of these days we can get out of here.
Maybe not far, we can start small. An apartment or a rental home, away from the parents who aren't yet ready to leave be our love and the friends who don't believe it. We can spend days and nights together, untouched by the world outside.
And then, one day, when I'm older, we can see the world. Amsterdam and France, New York and Chicago. Everywhere and anywhere in between and beyond, the universe is as much ours as we are its own creation.
Nights dripping with sweetness in cheap motels. Laughter in fast food joints and drive-throughs, salt on your lips. Hours on lonely highways when we can't be lonely at all, we have each other and a stack of CDs, nothing more we could need.
Every morning the soft light will come shining through a new window, each night the moonlight streams through a different set of blinds. And in each of those moments I'll be with you in whatever city, truck stop, or tourist town we've spent the night.
That's what I mean every time that I look at you and whisper "let's get out of here". It means "let's start a life".
And I mean it.
Memories of Soft Light
The sun came out for a moment today and, while I am fully aware that November has hardly begun, I couldn't help but picture ice dripping on a late-April afternoon.
Long, purple shadows fading into the pale-yellow, watery light, the sound of running water in the sidewalk cracks and bare branches fencing in the breeze like knights of dark and light.
It builds an ethereal feeling, one of floating with feet still planted, facing the sunset and dreaming of summer.
It's like mixing watercolor paints, brilliant oranges and reds flowing into pastel pinks and swirling amongst a soft periwinkle to make a perfect non-color against a glowing autumn-morning silver.
It feels like wearing church clothes on a Tuesday, like reading classics by candlelight, or sailing on a perfect mirror of a lake.
To be very specific, it feels like Easter Morning at five a.m. the year after your last egg hunt, suspended, in between the past and the future when the present feels too surreal to ever feel real.
The taste of sun I got today was something special, serene and perfect, a gentle caress before She goes with Hades for the winter.
So I vandalized the sidewalk in permanent markers, rocks cutting into my knees. And I wrote a hope that's becoming so swiftly a promise to you.
And believe me, I meant what I wrote.
Painted Wings
Watching an artist is like no other experience.
It's like watching the ocean uncover a seashell or a piece of polished glass. Like standing in the doorway of a hospital room and daring not speak as a new mother cradles her newborn child, the feeling of intruding yet being unable to leave the atmosphere of that room with all its new life and quiet joy.
Suddenly it's hard to care about the spray paint fumes or the acrylics dripping onto the bed sheets. Her hands, flying of their own accord, arms so covered in paint and ink that she may well be the canvas indeed.
