Detour Ahead

“We have eyes, and we’re looking at stuff all the time, all day long. And I just think that whatever our eyes touch should be beautiful, tasteful, appealing, and important.”

Hold him gently in your hands. He has been cracked enough as it is, and his heart is more shattered than he lets on.

Evening falls, that light between dreams and nostalgia. You are sitting at your favorite coffee house, sipping the same French press for an hour, regardless of its temperature. And it dawns on you, you’re going to leave here in a few days. This town, this old coffee house, and when you return this seat will no longer be yours. Incredibly reflective, you walk out to greet the stars, loving everything. You will stroll around like an afternoon lover, drunk with the embrace of another soul, saluting the artists that pass; but you will never feel this way again. It will not be repeated. That seat will feel strange. You will have an awkward conversation with the bartender about life as it had been. Are you thinking about it? Are you caught in the twilight of nostalgia before it even happens? Doesn’t that coffee taste like magic now and not bitter with the residue of soap? You remember falling in love and falling apart. Hauntingly beautiful and temporary. Childhood memories when the whole of winters felt like summer; teenage years of angst and thumbing through Dostoevsky and Salinger; College days when you became a question. You are drunk with the pockets of strange and aesthetic of the moon, sighing and sighing- a part of me is staying here. You see that old friend who you were so close to once and smile apprehensively. It’s the brevity. And it leaves us before it has begun. Nights smelling of cigarettes and perfume, that one you stopped wearing because it reminded you of them. I’m telling you kid. You’re going to have to leave. I know you love the sunrises here. The red wine summers and copious amounts of books and eclectic. But we all leave. It’s beautiful and sad and smells like your lover’s house. You know this already, sipping that second French press. There is a distance in your walk. Just now, half way through my sentence. You there, loving everything as if it were already drenched in memory. You already left.

I am greedy, in the sense that I am not satisfied with half-truths and half-conversations. I want it all, I want it to matter and if it doesn’t, then don’t talk to me.