Le Voyageur

With singing, the essence of it is to let the force of what comes from the center of your chest be sent out through the filter of what’s in the center of your head.

Like a lot of things.

It used to keep me up afterwards, shifting subtly so I wouldn’t wake her up. Side, front, overhead, a little closer, a scoot farther away, nothing seemed to work. The collapse after would always leave me facing her, sometimes her face turned to me, sometimes her back or side. The one arm always draped over her; this one wants fingers laced together, that one clasps my hand to her breast, or between her thighs, or under her cheek, or in her hair. Our legs the handles of spoons, or else the tangled tines of forks, or the knife rewrapped in the napkin. Torsos periodically pressing together, a continuation of sorts, aftershocks; our energies expended, but not our desires.
Still there was always the problem of what to do with the other arm. Leaving it under her never seemed comfortable for any of them. Extending it up, the headboard interfered, and soon enough led to losing sensation in my hand. Many other contortions made my shoulder complain. It just always felt like after our immediate passions were released there was a part of me that I couldn’t make fit in, that the afterwards was only going to work if it included some discomfort for me.

It was hot, it’d been too hot all fucking day. Too hot to stay sharp, but not staying sharp was not an option. He was on the way, on the way to where he was needed. It would’ve been easier to focus hours ago, when the day started, before the damnable heat and the relative monotony of the average day had sucked all the Oo-rah out of him. Now it was go time, and that’s no time for excuses. Still, he has to blink. He’s trying to stay alert, but the blink still comes, the blink with the sticky lids. His head loses track of upright, and his neck lets it start to fall.

That’s when all fucking hell explodes. That’s how it just goes sometimes, in the blink of an eye. Over the whine and thump of the engine and rotors, everybody’s barking over the radio, rockets firing, the evasive bank of the Hawk, suppression fire from the MG’s. His grip tightens around his rifle and the tubing of the bench. The alertness comes roaring back. His neck catches his head in its fall and whips it back up, the eyelids fighting that acceleration to open fully.

He finds himself gripping not rifle and seat, but the steering wheel. The thump comes from above him, but is only the traffic chopper. Rocket backwash, merely engine exhaust. The bike in the next lane idling loudly. Stuck in gridlock on the interstate on his way home from a long day at the office.

Drivers nearby are startled by the laughter, eyes wide, head tipped back, at the top of his lungs.

I don’t know when exactly I noticed the change.

There was a time I remember distinctly when I would get up and decide what I was going to do that day. Now, every day at some point I have to decide what I am not going to get done that day. We ask kids what are they going to do when they grow up as if that is what happens, as if you pick a thing to do. It really always felt more like picking things I was not going to do. I never really got good at it, and if not for the tyranny of time, I would still be doing everything, and doing it all well. The parts of me that don’t get to show up today are merely waiting for the day to get longer.
They’re jealous of the time I give to the parts in the front of the line, whose goals are at the top of the list. They still add their goals on at the bottom: the songs to perform, the house to raise, the garden to develop, the adventures to go on, the people to bring together, the furniture to build, but it takes a special effort to get them into any of the action lines of the agenda.

I don’t always want to do the things I’ve arrived at this moment of my life to do, though I was the one who made all the decisions that got me to this point. Once I got here, the consequences seem other than what the patient waiting parts of me willed. They want free will to moan that I am not free from consequences, but that’s not how anything works. Cause inevitably leads to effect, and if I demand to be the cause of my actions, I have to realize that too becomes a chain, although one of my own choosing. So, I don’t want to be free, not in the way the anarchist or the serial monogamist wants to be free – free to walk away, but then never able to accomplish the bigger tasks that require commitment. These are the tasks that require an actual exercise of the will, the ones I want to be given. So, I want free will, but I want to use it to assign myself a set of consequences, to be able to call them mine by choosing them, not just by finding myself in them. It is only by sticking with a certain set that I can start to set in motion chains of consequences that have their own consequences, and thereby remake the world.

If more people would join me in permanence, the world might stop falling apart so fast.

Sam said to me,  ”I can’t tell whether you’re joking or serious.”
They’re closely related. It’s from trying to see the basis of things. Sometimes it’s deep, sometimes it’s funny, most of the time it’s both. So much of the time I’m joking and serious.
“No, no,” he corrected me, “that’s not what I meant, I just mean you just go from one to the other and back without a pause, without taking a breath. You’re very even. You know what you’d be good at?”
Uh, listening? Being a therapist? Something that needs a steady hand?
“You could work for the CIA, like, this guy would come in, and you’d look over your shoulder, see him, and kill him all at the same time, and then just turn around with the next word of your sentence.”
Sure, or that. Sam, you’ve got quite the imagination there.
“Or poker, you could be good at poker.”
I suck at poker, I always think I’m going to win.
“Same with a lot of people who play the lottery.”
Yeah, maybe I’ll just keep doing this job.
“Works for me.”