November rain shimmered bleak on broken “Five One Seven” asphalt. An agitated capital howled back in the dampness of oil slick reflections. Clammy concrete amplified the winds, funneling nocturnal vagabonds. And the creep of city street creatures.
Aggravated skies leaked unseasonably warm, lake-fed temper tantrums. The river, bathed in polluted runaways, flowed heavy. But not heavy enough to live up to its named expectation.
Decayed leaves stuck to everything. An inconvenient reminder. A crumbling signature of another vindictive season of falling things. The one currently caught decomposing, down where the fish are all laddered back up.
Into that storm I walked, a vagrant heart absorbing the similarity of surroundings. Begging the connection of repetitive reminiscences. Twisting memory into disrobed branches. Matching the ones clawing up, clashing against the muted heavens to steal better illumination from all the forgotten gods.
In a forever gap torn in the eternity, measurements often break into meaningless markers. Usually in the intimacy of the exact moment when the closeness of six feet somehow transforms into a million fucking miles.
That was the storm into which I walked. Because it was to her that I just couldn’t run.
Or hear her voice on the phone; or find that silly note she left hidden for me to discover. Read that letter written in her swirly, purple ink print. Feel the reassuring magic of her laughter; consume the scent of her perfume into my hungry skin. Or absorb the caustic tears spilled in the purging of her many chemical transgressions.
Down into her storm I walked. Because I finally looked it up.
Looked it up on the tail end of a sleepless night sticky with nostalgia. With only the river and empty trees for company. When the hours were crawling wounded across the face of broken time. When the playlist didn’t play fair in its randomization of choice. Because it picked that fucking song.
And then I had to know.
Shaking fingers found the answer to a question I held off asking for two fucking years. It took all of three minutes. And then I had to drive, burdened with the weight of that enormity, for two hours.
She was easy to find. Not too far off of US 33. Along that part Indiana where the little lakes bear the names of woodland creatures. The ones no longer found much around those parts, ever since the forests surrendered over to more profitable flyover fields.
I stood alone in the rain. Then sprawled raw under naked oak.
Surrounded by wet stone, witnessed only by crumbling angels, I raged at a ghost.
Screamed at the scorch of unanswerable questions; bristled at the sting of the “what ifs.” Wanting desperately to rebel at the reality of it all. My brain demanding I reject the hurt. To simply refuse delivery. Because all I wanted to do in that moment was to claw at the earth with bare hands until I retrieved the warmth of her.
I stayed as long as my heart would allow. Spoke words that I will never write. Made confessions; played her the song my heart needed her to hear. Because I miss her like hell. And because we never got the chance to dance.
Then I kissed cold polished marble goodbye in the place of rosey warm lips.
The rain followed me when I left. An unwanted hitchhiker trailing behind on the last push back north. Back up to The City. Slingshotting around the rotunda. Looping the scar of the Capital. Dodging the drunks and barrelled restrictions until I collapsed on a familiar little hill where it started.
Overlooking the river, atop that peaked rise of Michigan topography, the clarity of my hindsight began to hurt old eyes. Because from that brittle vantage point, high, above this strange and terrible city, I could clearly see that she was probably the one.
And my broken heart fucking knew it, too…
