Everyday Reminders

She always reminded me of Neil Young.  Not in the way she wore her long silken curls, or the way she always anonymously waft of a rustic trail that she alone had forged and seldom welcomed others to walk.  Nor was it the muted mud stones that adorned her fair skin.  But when I looked at her, or even in her directions, it was a worn down, loved and nurtured six string that would breathe life in the motion she never idled in.  Directions plural, because to me, she was everywhere all at once.  She infiltrated everything.  My life, my sight, my thoughts and my dreams.  She was in every room I cautiously walked into, stopping to check for weak points in the structure for fear of the dead coming to collect on my debts.  She was in the art I soaked in, the music I was lost in, the work I burrowed into, the food I picked through, the bed I closed my eyes and drifted in.  She was everywhere, and I would have had it no other way.  I could not get enough of her, even on the darkest of stormy days, when our words flew past each other with a destination neither knew of.  When the sharpest and highest of intentions fell deftly short of each other, the meaning lost before ever having a chance to be found.  I would think when I found myself in the wrong, which was quite often, how I wish I had memorized how to let it go, to play the wrong – to make it right.  Words I permanently adorned to my darkest of bodily landmarks. Let it go.  My mind would furiously flip through the scattered pages of lessons I had hastily accumulated and took notes on – becoming a man, on growing up to be who my genetics and the history of mankind dictated me to be.  Let it go.  Where was that page?  All I could find was an amateurish hand sketched two-dimensional home, pigtailed smoke billowing out of the chimney, layered hills upon hills of a backyard and a long inviting path that led the eyes to the front door, perhaps for a chance meeting with Mr. Rockwell.  What the hell was I thinking, drawing such childish doodles on the day I was to be instilled with such important and life-altering lessons?  So many times, therefore, I was left to my own devices to wing it, to apply my rookie status – my diamond in the rough mindset – to the complex adult problems that would confront me on a relentless basis.  And, Christ, what a unequivocal disaster that would always prove to be.  I take with me the feeling that the progression of my life has always been paved with unending and unwarranted forgiveness from others. 

She always reminded me of Neil Young.  Her Puritan waves that rolled with the masses, crashed on the shores that nearly everyone had dug toes into at one point or another in their lives.  So unique, so different, but my god if everyone couldn’t relate to her.  She was the anti-siren whose breathing pushed us from jagged rocks, clarified the complexities of our problems – a voice that brought comfort and peace in a world of chaos and danger.  It was her own drum that made her song, her own drum that she unselfishly let us all dance to, but never could touch. It was her drum we always wanted to hear beat again.  What did I want?  I wanted that and more – I wanted to see her dance again, because I was still in love with her, even as the blood moon relegated itself to our memory.  The pillows under her legs only served to cushion the fact that she would never be yours, that she was an esteem rental, that you would never buy the love she possessed.  If you were lucky, though, she may strip down her feelings and play an acoustic set for you, only for you, and for one night only.  The rattle of the spoon against the glass of an empty bowl was the toll bells that rang poignantly when the music was coming to an anticlimactic end – and heaven help you if you didn’t take the time to record it to memory.
She always reminded me of Neil Young, so perfect, like “Harvest”.  When you would hear it, you just knew that it was the pinnacle of serene, the peak of the mountain she spent a lifetime building.  She was natures magnum opus, and her music was mine for a little while, no one else’s.  Perhaps I was greedy to think that it was how it was meant to stay, to evolve deeper into a storybook ending, where each day bought itself further acclaim in the eyes of her audience – me, and then everyone else.  She was Heart of Gold, and she was loved.   She was the Harvest Moon pseudo-sequel, yet remained The Needle and the Damage Done.  She was beautiful, she was perfectly imperfect, and she was my Hurricane.  And One of These Days, I’m gonna sit down and write a long letter, to all of the good friends I’ve known.   Then again, maybe I just did…