1995, Year of Reflection
Learning how to run uphill
January:
My mind contains no secrets not known to you, perhaps save one, one last secret I have been unable to share with you. Silence was never made of snow, but never again will I voice my friendship to those who live so close to me. I should never have become so comfortable with them, thinking they would help keep me safe.
None of it, for these people are prepared to sell me out without remorse.
Right now, I just want to be here for you. I don’t need testing out or doubting, and I don’t expect you to have to prove anything. I won’t ever let you down in any great way, but you cannot know me and expect me to give what I cannot; there are no right angles in my life, only bends. I wish for us to go around them together and explore sights and sounds we’ve never known.
February:
And so, the secret had come to claim me. I remember writing the above, tearfully hoping that such news could not be true. He was a businessman, polite and serious. There was nothing to say back then; it was confusing and hurtful. I was praying for guidance. I’d never met a tax man before. It was the first time I had such a feeling that frightened me. Steve told me I was broke.
I ran with my secret when what I most wanted to do was fall apart.
March:
I have managed my lifetime of detours, taken just for the hell of it, which is the best reason in the world to take anything. Remember the boy on the shore when all else has slipped away. I’ll give you that, and you dared to take on the better part of my wisdom. You have made my lies come true, and your honesty is so real, yet your dreams are just that: dreams.
That is why I am here. Did you not know I would come; did you not understand the meeting on the beach and the boy who came yelling and screaming as though his hands had been plunged into electricity? A boy running toward you and playing with his destiny as though it were his best friend.
They tell me everything comes to the person who waits. So, I wait. Fearful of what? Everything maybe but with the courage to take it on anyway. Let them find me. No remorseful person is waiting to confess all, only the same tight, arrogant chip of a lad who will turn winter into summer with a coin toss.
April:
He’s in your world again, more powerful, more articulate, more devastating, a man in a world of warriors but supreme, majestic, walking easily among men. See him now, walking, and all the time he’s looking for you, meeting other men who could, with a single clap, give you Paris, complete with Bistro’s, flowers, wine, outdoor book shops, and then, with another clap offer Rome, a thousand more claps and with everyone something new, something unbelievable. Yet, still, he never appeared. The one man, the only man who could take you back whence you came; the man who could hold you the way the shoreline holds the ocean, the man who could clap, and all that would happen is a smile.
A smile that burst open a sky. And that man is coming, and he isn’t looking right or left; he walks down the Champs-Élysées, or you see him come down Fifth Avenue or crossing Picadilly Circus on his way to Trafalgar Square. He never looks sideways, just walks past ten thousand years of mistakes and knows you are waiting, and he cannot sleep, for his mind is on the shore. Everything he hears is joy and laughter, a light, a vision, a young girl with a bright red heart, and he comes because she waits to finish her love with one man in that never-ending time.
May:
Did I ever imagine such tiredness? Did I have some vision of the pain? Did I ever wonder what I would look like with no hair? No money? Never. No dreams that foretold such wretchedness. The writer is capable of holding a mirror up to himself, to his work, so that he can see the present and the past.
This mirror is not me; this is something else; this is what could be. It is easy to drop the mirror to your side and be the person you see without the mirror. Only the men with the greatest courage, the champions, God’s men, can hold the mirror and tell themselves, this is me.
June:
Be careful, gypsy heart, for to dance is to entertain. Dance with me at your peril. No homemade prayer will save you from such as I. To commit the utterly perfect murder? Is that what you have in your heart? For it is in mine to kill monotony, to bring to life want, to smother loneliness, to strangle fear, to conquer death right there. A new warrior was born. Stronger than love, more irresistible than romance, a stranger walking through blue in starlight, hotter than the fiery whisper of breath on your cheek. I kill without mercy, cut no stone, and enter no bargaining. Mediocrity is doomed.
July:
What is hope? I have learned it is an expression. Hope springs eternal. A nurse came to me today to ask if I had pain. Was there something more she could do for me? What should I have said? That I need more drugs, or simply that pain is a state of mind? Aha, no it isn’t. Pain hurts. I am in pain, and yes, you may bring me something for it. Only the mind contains courage, the body does not, the heart pleads for mercy and intelligence tells the truth. Dear God, send me Melissa Toad, this ailment is no more than the common cold to one such as her.
August:
You a witch? For please, you must fathom my doubt. I have entered a thousand lands and never met a witch, but alas, you still try to fool me. ‘Tis a sly and artful trick, but you are bound by something else, some false perception of yourself, are you not? I challenge you. Give me your grated frogs powder and a cool kiss at four in the afternoon and never, please, another day’s sickness for me. Please, Melissa, please, please do not offend witches but make me believe. There is no assumption. There is the proof of your talents; there is only the twist of your tongue, there is the breast of salvation, but you must think more clearly for you will run dry of your spells, and I, the man who drinks Amontillado sherry with the creator on the sidewalk of the Champs-Élysées, the man forgiven for taking matches and kerosene to his classroom because education displeased him so.
Now look, Melissa, the mind of your teacher, the heartbeat of your dreams, the partner of your dance in need of your spells.
September:
We never walked the cliff tops, but we sat in the harbour of Tobermory and wistfully thought of other things. The colourful houses making the bend like a rainbow. The touch of your silken skin as you snuggled up to my body, the kiss of your mouth, the tingle of your teeth and the close-up stare of your eye looking at me. Such thoughts have kept me awake when sleep prevented pain. That’s a thought they never considered in medicine. Pain can disguise pain.
Ah, were I so young again to be the man who could inflame your passions, to wound your breasts nightly, to sink into your body, and make it sweat? What bliss. To bend you and break you with delight and sensual entrapment. To lay your body on a table in Spain and let the sun ravage and tender you so only the lightest touch pleased you. To bring you a strange and beautiful deep gentleness. To have my tongue point the direction and lose myself in the twists and turns of flesh that lead me to that place where all the sucking begins and, dies with your sighs. I am no vision, no thought, not even a hope in your imagination. I am Harry Hogg, an imaginative child, warrior against mediocrity, knight of your heart, and a boy running on the shore waiting.
October:
We talked about our dreams and made our bed that starship of love, romance, and tingling sensations. Not for us the wonder but the reality. ‘Lay still,’ you whisper, and lay still I do, feeling you grab me, holding me just there, the scent of you on my lips and the taste of you on my tongue. Not a fetish, not something dirty; just two people holding and melting and loving each other. Ultimately, it was love, the truest form of freedom, the safety of it all, the longing, the passion, the touch, the sensitivity; it was all freedom and honesty, and it was ours. Such an ache now tells me I’m still alive. That ache must remain because it is the thread of my life in the waiting. I must never lose sight of you in the stream, not the wild hair, the panties discarded, the texture of your buttocks, and the hair that covered you down there as you stooped to wash your hair in front of my eyes and teased my manhood.
November:
My God, life is a tricky and interesting business. The best you can hope for is burning candles, peat logs on the fire, and having a woman who’ll love you for everything. Do you know what I mean? Can you begin to see me with your eyes closed; can you sense the pleasure of living with a man who’s always trying to blow smoke up the chimney before the fire is lit? Can you begin to imagine what kind of boy made such a man? Maybe the same kind of girl that made such a woman!
December:
Another year without you. Another year of you being an entry in a diary. I watch the history of the year from here. See the vision of another year looming. I embrace both. You are both. The world is full of human comedy and tragedy. I stand on the shore, waiting. Each wave brings the sound of Christmas. Each Christmas I forget another contour of your face. It makes me sadder than the mourning clothes I still wear.
