hopelessly devoted to you
some thoughts from 2020
written sept. 2020
Hoping for life-upended is not new to me. What’s new is realizing how many of us would find solace if the world just got on with it already, and ended. Like we’ve been saying it would.
On some days, my hope for a tragic future gets me out of bed. Other days, it is my Kryptonite. I’m just a fool who’s willing to sit around and pipe dreams even though I rarely think everything will be OK.
In my love affair with life, I have immortalized Sandy — the character from Grease — and her storied romance with a bad boy. I caught my lover’s eye when I was a good girl, sunkissed, bedecked in yellow circle dresses with perfumed stationery. But to keep the love, I had to lose shit — innocence, a few brain cells, trust, the baby fat under my chin. I had to find some damn grit, some greaser leather, red pumps, and cigarettes. A hopeless devotee to life, and all of the death that comes with it.
About the others who carry on this same way, performing an ironic routine of simultaneously believing the fall of Babylon is neigh and that they need a haircut. The other night, I met with just such company in an empty pavilion at dusk outside of Baltimore Zoo’s gated entrance. There was a light rain. A family of deer took their dinner in shrubs surrounding the empty zoo, emboldened by the lack of humans these days. A paint bucket drum echoed in the distance. Normally, we’d share a joint, our fingers, and germs mingling with intention. This time we each smoked our own j, sitting six feet apart from one another on the cement floor, sliding a communal lighter back and forth like an air hockey puck.
— The way I see it, we’re on a bus with no brakes heading for a cliff, and the passengers are taking a vote as to whether they want the bus driver to wear a red tie or a blue tie, my friend says between puffs.
Would yesteryear’s poets be disheartened if they saw us here in the beauty of the dark night with all of our pansexuality, eating our hearts out, beating our breasts over the same shit they did seventy years ago? Or would they find pleasure in the irony?
Perhaps every generation experiences a collective depression just before the dawn of a fight, a ritual mourning of dashed hope, the same hope that elders try so desperately to preserve in us. What comes next then if not a rising from the ashes and an angel of the morning pleading for one final touch as the earth slowly turns? How iconic.
