If Nothing Else

I’ve been listening to a lot of Over the Rhine. You should, too.

They have a song, If Nothing Else, which I only discovered last week. Usually I just listen to the entire discography, starting with the most recent album, working backwards. I guess at some point I made it to 2002, when they released If Nothing Else.

I think it’s beautiful.

if nothing else i can dream
i can dream
i’ll never tell never tell
all i’ve seen
right in front of me,
like the ghost of every thing that i could be
in the cool and callous grip of reality

It seems like every few days Nikki and I look at each other and wonder what is it we really want? Is it wrong that what we’re most excited about in Cincinnati is having season tickets to Xavier games and getting our cat back?

Or that we dream one day of fleeing America for a Mediterranean village to eat salad and nuts and cheese and lie on the beach all summer?

The reality is that I think we’re both tired. We’re thinking of that moment, six months or a year or two years from now when we wake up to the sun peeping above the Cincinnati hills, turn to each other and realize we’re home.

We started Linger Flowers because our dream is to linger as a way of life. For all our love for Moscow and Brooklyn, we have done very little lingering these last two years. Flowers are the way we see out, the way for us to live and love and work, rather than be spun forever by ennui.

And yet, I know this frantic scurrying, this effort to carve out a meaningful existence, is okay.

We’ve made so many mistakes since we met 5 years ago, at this point our best response to the latest frustration or miscalculation is a wistful smile and promise to “do it better next time.” Of course, next time is always something different, and we fall down again, our faces splattered in mud.

I think we see just clearly enough, too, to understand that at almost every turn we’ve been nauseatingly lucky. To be young, white, educated, heterosexual, American, Christian, middle-class…

As Over the Rhine says, these

words in my head
like misfits after midnight
begging for a light
words left unsaid
they may never see the light of day
and that may be okay
if nothing else i can dream

Dreams have carried us this far. I know they will continue to carry us, on to Cincinnati and a future.