The thing about love is it’s like a brand new sports car, in a series of shiny new sports cars and until you’ve learned anything worth the fussing about, it’s a race but not tires blasting away on the concrete, greaser style side by side until somebody reaches the waving handkerchief in time. Nope. It’s just a race between lovers to see who can total the car first. That mystical thing… love. All those great ones you’ll miss later were the hot rocks you kept tossing back and forth until the thing hits the ground and cracks into a bazillion pieces of shiny tears. Tomorrow tears. A wise woman once told me, the way you get over a big love is you “total the car” that way “you can’t drive it again, no matter how bad you want to.” If you total the car it’s the easiest way to ruin it enough that you won’t ever drive it again. We are junkyards. We who dare to dream, to love, hearts the size of that ghostly jewel crossing the starry bleakness above when the day has done its tricks and moved westward someplace far off, turning whatever it can yellow and bright. Waking up the birds as it makes its way across those big blue oceans tossing and turning with all that baggage and worry interrupting the continents and whatever temples it hasn’t swallowed yet. Some of my favorite songs are about driving, shit most of the best ones happen around a car, this is by design and even better when they’re set in someplace dark, Jean jacket on, hair just right, nothing left to lose out under some full moon however long ago. Someone’s forever, someone’s yesterday. The moon loaned itself to songs and good films a long time ago and the deal went down without any ink on the page. Only an ache to suffer later that you couldn’t ever shake. Those hellhounds carrying that receipt on a path deep down in your veins where the heartache settles in for good and eventually turns your skeleton into popcorn and a worn out couch of too many sighs and a good heavy quilt for the dreaming. They don’t make medicine to undo what that moon does when it falls out of the sky into your arms for however short a time. Nothing will ever fill them the right way again and you’re just a depressed astronaut, the gravity wild and blue crossed over your bones like a lumberjack trapped under a tree that isn’t there anymore but didn’t have to be. You’re on your back like a tortoise in the desert, the questions all written out for you ahead of time with answers sounding like only more questions. Han fired first. It’s how it is no matter who changes it now. It’s become a painful sort of vision over time, that strawberry moon and the way she looked at you. All that love, your junkyard on the edges of the nothing where you’re floating over the vast array of galaxies all by yourself, remote control, cats, black and white movies and a stack of books you read but fill back up, all that information all those stories the water splashing as you try and keep your head up out of the jelly jar of blackness below. Something better than the booze which never worked anyway. A reminder of the passing of time despite the lull of feelings no tide ever carries off. That beach you’ll never find again no matter how hard you try, toffee, putt putt and sea foam collapsing on your shoulders as you talk to her old man and he asks you about the other guy using his nickname. You’ll just feel sick for the rest of the summer. Wishing it backwards, trying to put the car back together in your mind, somehow it isn’t as broken as you are hearing that name over and over, like an albatross, like a harvest moon for a bitter thing growing taller by the minute outside the door. I like these two Neil Young songs. After the Gold Rush sounds like he’s on shrooms maybe but Harvest Moon… That’s my life. That’s me now. Lost in the golden amber glow of a house full of cats, the rest of the world someplace laughing under the lights of some marvelous restaurant like Balthazar with new stories to tell, and brand new smiles for brand new jokes. But I made this bed, or it was made for me. I don’t have to sleep in it anymore. I can sit by the window and read and listen to the sounds of the wolves someplace out on the edges of the forest, reminding me they are there, letting me know they are calling me home. The lake is full of ghosts in the center of my chest and it is freezing over as the years unspool and I’m ok with that. I’m here for the whole of the ache, that sweetness having hit my lips a few times and that few times enough to make me question everything about being here. When I sing now, it’s a mystery not a call to the wild. It’s a map of missing things and missing places in my ribs where I can barely fit the ache of present ghosts. It’s a full house and my heart beats around the empty spaces now because it doesn’t know what else to do. The thing about that old moon, doing it’s haunting thing, changing color, strawberry one month, pumpkin orange later on, just rising up and then falling like one of the three stooges, hiding up in that blueberry sky, faintly waiting there in full form behind some uncertain cloud that gives up and dissipates out during the day like it’s staring you down at a safe distance, judging you as you cross the mile markers spray painted on the worn out bricks of some old factory wall, or when it’s taking on different shapes like it does cascading the light just so and making itself looking like a cycle, like something you sit in like a hammock in some old movie, all of that is just gas. That old moon is such a bullshitter. It’s the phantom we can all rely on to stay just that much witchier even when we know we aren’t challenging any better ideas of being a part of the forces of nature. I can sing that song Harvest Moon from a honest place because I was once handed the moon, after losing everything and without even asking for it, nobody having promised me it. And the thing about the moon is it hurts all the more when you were okay with it way up there out of reach, a star swollen with stardust too far up to reach and it comes down awhile and dances with you under those soft night time lights in a quaint northern town. And then, just like that, it’s gone. That’s how you learn to understand anything at all, if you are a me, out there lost in the shadows of the oaks next to the house, peeling your eyes from an Amor Towels book and looking upwards at that shining nighttime rock, like God’s own watch, keeping time on the depth of ache in your soul as the years carry you further from the initial shock of pain, down river collecting branches and leaves and winter shadows, until you’re alive in a way you weren’t before, so certain of the delicate meaning of being loved, of being fully here, eyes aglow from a fire in the fireplace as that quiet perfection of people around you drifting off in front of the tv, the animals breathing next to you on the couch, knowing there’s nothing to hold on to. Just as sure as that moon rises it falls away, and eventually we are all one with the night and the spaces between the things we are not, with no surface for the sun to reflect that milky blue light off of. Until we are just a song floating away in the big nothing. A pile of memories and that same old dream of the moon to meet you in the night when your eyes get too heavy. It’s a better deal than no deal at all and a stupid prize for a game you didn’t know you were even playing. I side with the dreams now. I guess maybe I always did. tbc XO DRA June 2024

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