Creased photographs, grey light and drives not taken, August '06,'09

As opposed to drives taken, but that comes later.


I have a photo by the side of my bed. I have not gotten to the point where I am marching solo through life, or where folks are not coming through my house as if they own the place, so, on occasion, it does come down and gets secreted away in my sock drawer. But when it does it rests next to the "Jane, Patron saint of Cookbooks" shot and the sliver of the photo of you eating curry at my kitchen table that is folded around the inside of a juice glass. The wavyness of that glass makes for a sort of 3-D effect, which is uncanny and joyful all at once.


No, the photo that is next to my bed is the one I showed you the last time we met. It was folded and tucked away in my wallet. I had given it to you once, framed. We had a spat and were breaking up, one of the half dozen or so times we split up before you first coda. I figured that that photo, one you said looked like a pretty content couple, would somehow help you see. You had things to figure out, the tide was turning against us and I knew that photo wasn't going to change the course of events, but I wanted you to have it, to have that artifact as a reminder of our times and what we were together and that was content.


But life is not about resting on laurels, about contentment. It is about struggle and striving and the eternal search for happiness. Sometimes ours, sometimes somebody elses. In this case, it was neither mine nor yours that we were seeking, it was your partner's. We had to give the relationship, the happiness, the contentness over to him in order for him not to be a broken man. He held the trump card even if, for the moment, you had the photo.


You passed that photo back to me amongst other things turning that tumultuous fall of '06. I cannot remember if it came back to me in the Fossil bag with that purple folder or not. One thing for certain, when I saw it I knew that the spell was broken, that the dame with large hat had fled the scene, that the double sunset had lost it's magic. I knew that that photo, once framed and lovingly handed over to you, would have to rest and refind it's magic elsewhere.


And so it has. I took a drive to Kopachuck and sat on the sand where those two lovers in the photo sat. I took that photo out of the frame, folded it and stuck it in my wallet. Over time it creased and took on the edges of a worn object, an unknown cargo without a slip case, a loaded weapon if there ever was one to be carried while my Estranged One was still about. But it traveled up and down the coast with me, occasionally swapped out for lesser things, until the day I took it out and shared it with you.


I look at that day, the day I showed you that photo, the day you saw your Pendleton box of letters, as the day you saw the Holy Grail. That, or the leavings of an obsessed man. Neither, I suppose, more the relics of an age, more the keepings of a devoted man. As Friar Tuck told me in a letter, if you weren't such a great lady my devotion to you would be dubious. But when I woke up this morning in that grey predawn light, it was all I could do to jump in the car and throw one of the first dahilas of the season on your lawn. I looked over to that photo, reframed, set by my bed and just said "good morning, M", instead.

Know that some nights later, in a fit of wine and pique, I took that drive to your street, parked the car, and dropped a small piece of copper studded rock in your garden. Somehow that devotion needed a reminder that I was still out there, carrying a torch that somebody needed to carry, if not so much a reminder of our days, as a study of what it means to love and carry that love. Others have done it before me. That photo and I are just part of long tradition.


Let the grey light come. I will wake up and study it and look over, see the creases in photo stock and know that it is only one more morning, one more dawn to get through. All days begin with something, and mine begin with a good morning to you.


Your WHMB