Friends Are Fewer
Macallan stays
I cannot get enough of winter’s lit up mornings. Watching birds in bare limbed trees, hedgehogs grumbling, squirrels darting through leaves, looking for friends to cuddle up to and sleep with. Even my cats lose interest in the frosty outdoors long before noon, returning to sleep the afternoon by the fire.
Friends are fewer than they’ve ever been. I’m too busy putting work into work, neglecting friends, and putting off making respectful decisions that would enable the care of both.
I’m long past the stage of apology.
Anything I could say to those who might have needed me is too little, too late. The trick with autumn is letting it lie where it falls. The business of a good man is not that he must pick himself up but any friend who may have stumbled amid the yellow leaves.
I am not that man.
This last year has been a year like none before it. In rooms and out of rooms, warm beneath blue skies, Covid-19 dominates all thought. The hibernation stories have been written for my reference only; younger days or yesterday, this morning, or mornings yet to come.
Love, coming out of the shadows, is a collection of ideas, laughable to some, sad to many. But no one dies from a lack of love, only not being able to show it. When I think of love, I wish I had perfected the idea, then been satisfied forever. I know that I have lived a life never having missed the greatest of loves, only that I brushed aside one memory for another.
So, for all the years added up, I know that nothing waits. It’s not the will to live that’s important — re-living what is old, that is the trick. I’m finally living in a place that needs no long reach backward, no trying to pull love through the rabbit hole of times gone. But love was never meant for pulling forward, only giving back.
Happy days have come. Sadness, left in the shadows, grows softer when looking backward. Memories have finally gone back there, to yesterday, or to past lives.
Age has not made me a man more agreeable, only less demanding. No matter what despair, what loneliness, what beauty kept me from moving forward, I always got back home to safety.
I don’t fear the night sky, only the empty shoreline, the clock unwinding, or the love left across the street.
I know that I won’t pick up the phone or return that call.
© Harry Hogg 2021
