My parents send a snuggly selfie. Forty-seven years since their snowy wedding day, how young they were, how impossible to imagine the future upon which they were about to embark. An entire life lies behind them: emigrating across the ocean, South Pacific hut nights, four floors of state of the art production studio, a bankruptcy from which no one could recover, seven continents underneath their feet, late summer night bike rides back from the old office, I just have to save the world then I'll come home, I promise then I'll come home. Forty-seven years later and not one of us knows what home is.
I heard your new songs today. I have forgotten to listen, lately, have forgotten your adopted accent and the spaces into which I inserted my own aches, I am all spaces myself, but you go on speaking. He says I heard Like a Rolling Stone as though for the first time, and all I can say is You know it's not a happy song, right? Anyone already on the tarmac refuses to see the writing on the wall.
This is the rule.
He says I am tired, but I have much left to do, and you know it's his journey alone to make. We die, unsatisfied: this is what it is to be human.
I had so much left to do.
June arrives with its usual daggers. You try to learn the lessons before you bleed. But maybe bleeding is how we know
we are alive.
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