When you feel both too old.
And so alone.
And you wonder where did that girl go, lost in the snow, on the bridge over the Seine?
She made it look so pretty then.
She did not know.
I did not know.
Maybe I still don’t.
But you know, my credit score is so much better now.
Still blue.
Still just too young and oh, oh, oh, no, I am getting old.
I can fight it off.
To a point.
I can buy that pretty fuzzy lavender Forever 21 cardigan at Crossroads in the Castro and take back the Fluevogs that didn’t sell on consignment–I’m rather glad they didn’t, they’re mine–and pose cute with soft light in my loft.
My loft.
My love.
It’s not really mine.
But just for a moment or a year, I can say, I lived/live in a live/work loft in San Francisco.
You know, I’ve always wanted that.
I just wish it was in the Mission.
That would be the best, a warehouse in the Mission.
Where I got this notion, I cannot tell you, in some fairy tale of urban life, a long time ago, dreamed up by a girl who wanted to escape and thought, maybe, maybe, maybe I’m beautiful.
but i could never tell
Ah.
Melancholy.
Like the winter snow over Cafe Montmartre in Madison.
A cigarette smoldering in the ashtray, a halo of snow in the light of the street lamp, candles flickering on the empty tables around us, you with your hair pulled back in a pony tail and your eyes that looked at me with too much need, a romantic moment with snifters of elixirs and a story that looked pretty on the outside but left me.
Empty.
Sad.
Overstuffed with all the food I had to eat to kill the pain.
Until I couldn’t kill it anymore and I killed you, sorry love, I sense you have done well, a wife, children, a house. I see you now and again, but I don’t look too hard, it’s not my place, that slot was taken, but I know, I have the photograph that you always wanted me to give back, the one with your eyes and soul, naked love, on your face.
I don’t even remember when you told me you loved me.
I remember the first time you proposed though.
And took it back, to kick yourself years later.
But I was gone.
Off to California.
You cheated on your girlfriend to be with your ex-girlfriend one last time and the waitress at Monty’s Blue Plate Diner commented on how nice it was to see us again as we sat in the booth eating breakfast, for the last time.
I know you’re well.
And all the other corners of the universe where I could have or would have existed, in pockets of possibilities and dreams of wistfullness.
Up here in my loft listening to Joni Mitchell and feeling slightly lost and just a smidgeon alone.
Knowing.
It will pass.
I don’t have this mood often.
And it is not the worst thing, it’s just a soft vulnerable belly of pain and loneliness.
It happens.
“Why do you think I don’t have a boyfriend?” I asked my lover.
“You live in San Francisco,” he teased.
Yes, I know, maybe the gay male population is not interested in dating a woman with breasts who towers taller than six foot in heels, but I love them, they love me.
But no, they do not make good lovers for me, although the love I get from them, exceptional.
“I’m serious,” I said, “you said once that ‘you’re not going to get a boyfriend by posting sweaty naked pictures of yourself on Facebook.”
I doth protetst.
A little.
Not too much, though, not naked, work out gear doesn’t leave much to the imagination.
And this was before we were lovers but noodling down that path.
It was a path I think I knew where it was going the first phone call.
The help with the things and the bits and the guidance before we even met.
But I am not here to talk about that, ‘secret lover’.
No.
I am thinking what you said later, “you have no peers.”
And that, that might be more aligned with the truth, although the truth is always, for me, on the slant.
I have friends and I know ridiculous and amazing people.
But.
Yes.
I do feel like the odd one out and tonight, watching a show about love and suddenly melancholic I think about old boyfriends and passing kisses and moments in the night, at a bar on Telegraph in Berkeley or doing a poetry slam at the Starry Plough and the misses in the night and the tumbled up on a couch with a tousled, drunken angel with a smatter of smashed out cigarettes and the too thin remnants of a line of cocaine on the coffee table, “I thought you were a lesbian with your short hair,” he said and grinned and kissed me dead and then passed out in my lap.
I left before he woke up to catch the first BART to the city and wander into the daylight seeping up from the East casting shadows in front of me as I walked through the Mission and stopped for coffee at Philz, when it was still a bodega and the last place I ever bought alcohol from.
And I can see her, me, all the compressed pieces and parts and the romantic heart, the ridiculousness of finding myself and my beauty just as it is about to die and my hair grows fine and grey and falls out in alarming swirls down the drain and why did that post about that song come up and why?
WHY?
Are so many people reading my blog?
All of the sudden, five, six months back, weeks of readers and spooky spikes–literally one day it had over 3,200 reads.
In one day.
Readers all over.
Not that I know who they are, do they know who I am?
One or two or fifteen maybe.
But tonight.
Right now in the pink light from the one strand of Christmas lights I won’t let die, listening to Joni Mitchell and Christmas is long gone, though just three weeks back, and tomorrow I will dress up and parade in front of the boys at Most Holy Redeemer and poke fun at myself and laugh and be joyous.
But here, this, soft, near midnight melancholy sallied forth to me and instead of thumbing through pictures and posts of others who I have never met in real life, I thought, it’s time to write.
When I feel like this, it is time to right, Freudian slip, time to write.
Because sometimes when I least expect it, the song is right, a memory floats up, and suddenly I see someone reading a blog I wrote in Paris, when I was so, so, so very sure that was where I would be living out my days.
Writing in some cafe, always writing, or walking, lost at sunset, bewitched and beguiled, by the sun floating in the western banks of swan blue clouds and that shimmering gold dust light that is magic fairy luminescence that you only see in the air of Paris.
And I’m not there.
Just reading words I wrote there and here, in my bed, in my black cotton pajamas with pink piping and polka dots, alone, soft, sad, slight magic still spinning in my heart, an echo of the girl in the apple orchard, the girl on Stinson beach, the beer soaked kiss in the dark apartment, dancing to the Brazilian band at the Elbow Room, eyes wide with wonder at the Defenstration Building on 6th street, you warm in my bed, refusing to make love to me, but holding me with love, and every man becomes another impression of love and roses and kisses and where are all my love letters?
Burnt in the windy night at Ocean Beach when it was so cold.
So cold.
And the mermaids cried each to each.
And I do not eat peaches.
But I will dare to kiss a persimmon.
The sea salt in bins at Rainbow and the tears that want to fall down my face but never do.
Love so sweet.
Witch.
Poet.
Fairykind.
Lost in the tall grass under the willow and will you find me there one day in a pink and yellow lawn chair from the 80s, secretly procured from the MOMA’s museum store in New York, with webs in my hair and stories on my lips watching a moon set, like a flat piece of cardboard in the sunset dusk while the record changes from Mitchell to Van Morrison, to the sweet sound of an ukulele playing memories of songs on a bridge in Venice.
And the heartache will fall on the horizon and my cats will prowl about and birds will call one last song to the settled sun and I will remember when.
When.
When.
I was all the girls at the same time and a melancholic woman alone at the call and whimsy of the night with the music floating up the stairs to the loft.
I have arrived to the place.
Two minutes to midnight.
With winding tears on my cheeks and a heart full.
I may be alone, Virginia.
But I am not lonely.
I am.
Multitudes.
Auntiebubba 