Candlelight From Within Red Glass (The Time Capsule of Memory)

8:04 pm; In my favorite cavernous bar. Elton John's Your Song just came on over the speakers playing here, and with it, the most vivid imagery of the last two minutes of a few hour long drive from long ago.

Pulling up after an endlessly curled and narrow path supposedly for cars, to reveal a driveway.

Moss. Forest. Deep green black parted to reveal a strange and crooked beautiful castle disguised with white paint, doilies, VHS tapes and antiquated cookbooks.

The beginning of a weekend that is engraved in my mind for beautiful and horrid reasons, both equal in their weight.

I bled so much those months. Every time you would do something awful, I would start to bleed.

Somehow it makes sense that the entire weekend the pulse of a hounded rabbit haunted my throat, relieved in syrup, intermittently, with the deepest slow of meditation. 

Do you know that when you left that night, and came back thinking I had stayed because I wanted you it was, in truth, because upon your slamming of the door, it began again. I ran to the bathroom because I could feel the blood coming. And it kept me there. It filled the white porcelain of your bowl. So thick of crimson against it's ivory hands.  

It's all so sad, now. The carpet of that castle looked like dried blood, and it would be roughly a month until you decide to slit the throat-down-to-the-gut of that memory.  Looking back, I can see all of the soaked walls. How could I not see it then?

Light within red glass: A light glowing from inside this body of blood.  As if my entire body wanted you away from me. I never told you that the bleeding started the day that I met you.

Oh, it has nothing to do with hindsight. It has everything to do with the truth hidden in plain view.  The jewels hidden in the closet as false as anything I held in my hands those few nights.

How strange it is that our bodies know more than anything we can think or feel. The bleeding stopped the night that I left you. 

But that weekend the pizza was warm and somehow, within that, there was still a love that existed- malnourished and acidic as it may have been.

All feral animals begin to trust by virtue of food.

I am no exception.



(link, here, to Elton John's Your Song)

I hope you don't mind
that I put down in words
How wonderful life is
while you're in the world.



**

Title: Catholicism
Image: Closer
Non-Fiction Source of Inspiration: Steve Stern's The Memory Box of Pinochet, historical trilogy
It is my father's birthday tonight.  This, too, comes as no surprise or lack of inspiration.