|
|
|
- I know I've written about the hole in my soul before but I was pointedly reminded of it this morning because for no reason at all I thought about that song and short story I used to read and I decided to find it all again - I couldn't even remember the names of these things but I had to find them. It took me 20 seconds and there I was again listening to that piano playing and thinking that the greatest tragedy of my life is Tim and I will never be able to get away from that. I've always said there's a hole in my soul without him but don't start thinking that's the zenith of all things because there's also a hole in my soul without a piano that I can play for an hour every day. I am fine and will be fine and I am prone to hyperbole and emotional exaggeration. But it is true - there is a hole in my soul (or two, counting the piano one) which doesn't mean I can't continue moving forward, it just means that on occasion I get this horrible feeling in my chest that everything is wrong and lost, and I wonder how in the world these two people who 15 years ago were sitting in exotic locales - world travelers full of airplanes and dreams - came to this. The last I heard from him he'd had his passport confiscated and was stuck in Berlin. I don't know how you get your passport confiscated but I imagine it's not at all unrelated to his being an alcoholic asshole, and I imagine some idiotic scene that wouldn't happen in anyone else's timeline except that he's stubborn and irrational and paranoid, and a drunk accustomed to homelessness, so things like that do happen in his life. He was wanting to go back to Australia, he said. But how would he get there? Maybe he's there now and I'll calm myself down by imaging that, Tim in Australia again, sitting at a cafe on a sidewalk, walking next to the harbor, the hustle and bustle of everything, a job and a room and he's okay. It was three years ago when the puppy's roommate's best friend died of a drug overdose, and it was two years ago when he left to get hip surgery. The other day we spent a couple hours looking at old cans and bottles he'd found in the woods, researching the stamps on the ends of the glass bottles to date the logging camp to 1915-1925 or thereabouts. Does this mean anything, I don't know. It's hot and there are fights and fights at the gas station suddenly, people yelling at cars or at each other. Don't listen to Eluvium in the morning, is the lesson to take from this.
|