Seamstress for the Band

I look at these girls, 23? 24?, sitting there with beers, cigarettes, and the most expectant hearts in the world. Our eyes both hold a nameless portent in their flashing: hunger, a desire for everything and nothing, hope, sorrow, and maybe tiny glints of premonition for what was to become of us. Those eyes tell me that we knew then a thing infinitely vaster than the lives we were leading at the time; something more the truth than either of us could have ever realized.

The power in this drunken snapshot lie not in our ability to do anything we wanted at the time, but rather in our knowing that there was not a thing that you and I couldn’t do. We were alive, even if the rest of the world slept soundly around us.

Since this photograph, we have sustained divorce, shattered friendships, jobs that came and went in years that feel akin to blinking; you, alone, have been a muse, a mermaid, and a mystery to those lucky enough to gravitate into your boundless and unfathomable orbit. You taught me my immense love for Dickey: Lord, let me shake with purpose… Komunyakaa: In the black mirror
a woman’s trying to erase names: No, she’s brushing a boy’s hair. – with the simplicity of nothing more than your voice as you recited them to me from memory; your hands shaking as you flicked cigarettes absently in our hidden place where poetry and life merged seamlessly into the presence of our blossoming lives. Poems, and Music, were the context in which we began to understand everything that growing up truly meant.

Those girls in that photo, with boiling blood and upward surging lives, held close the secrets that each of us might forget on occasion, but it is unspoken and understood that the other will always be there to remind us in vivid detail who we are and have always been. Our piercings have come and gone again, new skin grown over scars. Streaks of blue and red in our hair have washed out, but still, here, you and I remain. Our hearts were destined to break again and again; they were, and still are, too vast to expect any other outcome. We develop into more pure and immaculate narratives of ourselves; closer to our most authentic dreams than ever before.

So, my birthday girl, tonight I hope that you enjoy a fine vintage from the year of your birth, that you look out at our pale moon and the night stars and make as many wishes as you have breaths to make them, and that above all, each and every one of them come meticulously and inerrably true.

Happy birthday to one of the great loves of MY life.

MP3: Here Comes The Sun (The Beatles Cover)

posted by rikki.