To the 25-year-old contractor who paints buildings:

This is probably just some temp job for you. Maybe it’s the only trade you ever learned to do. I saw you down at the loading dock, your silhouette in the doorframe, standing outside in the rain. Your damp, shoulder-length brown hair began to curl. You pulled out a cigarette, might have been Camel blue, and reached for your lighter, but stopped because you saw me watching. I think that made you nervous, or perhaps embarrassed, so you moved out of my line of vision the way a dog runs under the couch after it’s scolded.

You didn’t say much until the contracted work was at its end. By then, you were giving me full smiles when I held doors for you, and nods of greeting subtle enough to have been imagined.

From what I saw, you only have two teeth. I wonder how you lost them… Too much soda in high school? A fight? Those Camels you try to hide? No matter. I get the feeling it is inconsequential to you. You are likely not from the same crop of people who get their way just by looking nice. No, you’ve had to work for every little shoelace and gallon of gasoline you’ve afforded. Appearances are as menial to you as luxury trips to Santorini or terrace-at-sunset mojitos on the cape. Survival is all.

This is the color of Death Cab

and cloudy vision.

I was hoping for someone like you all my life, the blue-green depths of rightness,

of surety, of the absolute

that accompanies the ignorance

of not having lived long enough

to scar then heal.

I’ve found the ocean

but I could never find the courage

to even hope for solid ground.

Then one day, like a pulsing vision,

like a vivid memory of being a child

that beats the heart into rhythm,

you arrived.

But I wasn’t ready.

I hadn’t learned how to give myself away

in equal parts heart and mind.

I only knew how to run,

which was enough for everything

I’ve had to face before now.

But it seems it’s no longer enough,

and I’m at a loss.

“YOU SELL-OUT!” I scream at my reflection. Regret is a weapon that shreds perspective to pieces. You can be honest and all your actions may be motivated by hope, but regret mutilates goodness until the only hope left is for a better past. We’re addicted to breathing in that exhale of yesterday. The obsession with scene recall. But life is not a movie to rewind. I know this. Still. I can’t stop remembering:

Those heavy black curtains, black bed frame, black sheets.

Being shoved into some dark corner of desire.

The shocking tug inside my chest as we laid together on my Italian twin bed.

A country song, loud, down a country road, the windows low and a friend in each seat. Eating the juiciest plum in the port of Antibes.

The first time a boy called me ugly.

Every time after that someone called me beautiful, or yelled nice ass! from a car window, and never believing any of it, resenting it for years, until one day when I stopped resenting it, started experiencing a gory revelry in it, holding that delicious attention between my thighs and squeezing...

Memories. They build golden mountains out of dust, and monsters of the most apathetic moments. But we like it that way. It amplifies the pain and pleasure. We cannot face a history that holds no coherence, no intention, just the chaos of random choice and event on a scattered timeline of existing. How did we arrive here in the first place? Maybe somewhere inside we know the answer, and we’re terrified of that forbidden knowledge. The only option is to scramble along for purpose every single day, overturning rubble in this crumbled city of expectation. Building little shapes and feelings from the leftovers. Sharing secrets through broken windows, shouting save me into dark bedrooms, scratching ghost-saviors into bricks to resurrect what has been long dead.

It is ignorance.

The truth is, I’m a sell-out because I keep crawling back to the same burning need that struck me down in the first place. This is madness! I want the same thing, over and over and over again, no matter the type of face or shade of landscape. This is a dangerous void that must be sewn shut before too many guts come spilling out. Today the thing has brown hair and red pants. Tomorrow the thing will be an overseas work visa. A medieval city. Tapas. Prosecco. Corinth. A ferry ride and a ferris-wheel piazza. Irish pub crawls and Glasgow slang.

I cannot say how many visions I will use as a return to the same old need, how many times I will ignore the insanity of that compulsion, but I can say it will eventually kill me.