This is something I wrote for a creative writing class last Fall. I thought I’d try to post it somewhere. The italicized parts are from a poem called “The Awful Rowing Toward God” by Anne Sexton in a book of the same title.
1. Love is a song with your name as its bassline.
Where then? I cannot move an inch. -Anne Sexton
Yes, that means it’s all about you. You and your name are with me always. Like the circadian rhythm, it gives order to my days. Well, not my days so much as my moments. Your name attaches itself to my experiences. My early impressions of anything hit your name on the way out.
You come and go but your name pushes its way into everything around me. I see monkeys on TV and there it is. You like monkeys and TV. I hear the word “work.” That’s a word you use frequently. I read about running into someone at Trader Joe’s and think of you in the frozen food aisle. To be honest, I think of you in the frozen food aisle every time I go. The possibility of your presence again there makes me pause each time I peer around the aisle’s corner. Your name comes to me in every song I hear, every film I watch, every street where we once stood.
In the car sometimes I look over and smile at you where you used to be. Your name escapes my lips throughout the day. I miss you ___. I love you ____. Hi ____.
I meet someone who falls in love with me and it’s your name that won’t leave my mind. I cross the globe to forget you and cry leaving Berlin because it reminded me of you and in leaving it, I feel I am finally leaving you behind. I do what I can to erase your name, but its absense starts to structure my moments and make it impossible to move.
This does not mean the song is always sad. It’s built around you and is therefore more beautiful than any song I’ve heard aloud. It has all my favorite instruments. It is ornamented with xylaphone, bleeps and a shaker. There are two patterns to the bassline. One includes your last name and repeats both words with different points of emphasis. The other is in the rhythm C. made of your name the night you gave me a ride to my car and again 5 years later from the stage at the echo. ___ __.
Yes I still live in Echo Park. Yes I am still waiting for you. Yes you mean the world to me. Still. I cannot speak your name to others but it has never left my mind.
2. Love is a song with his name as its bassline.
Heaven replies “Not so! Not so!”
He’s never there for me when I need him. I call his name and get no answer. I yell out my feelings anyway but his lack of response is
the only thing I hear. He never lets me run to him. He stays at a distance. My heart sits waiting but his is always out of reach. He is even now standing at the other end of the bar, sitting in the seat next to mine in the balcony, resting inches away from me in the restaurant booth. He looks a little different than when I imagine him - older. We keep getting older. But no, I catch a glimpse of his eyes and they are the same as always.
His voice can make me forget where I am and who I am and my whole nervous system shuts down and the next thing I know I’m not sure how long I’ve been standing there without moving and I quickly walk away. His song is such that I can never make out the lyrics and tend to fill them in only after they’ve long passed. His song is pretty but gets drowned out in noise. He puts it out there and then takes it back.
He amazes me with his smallest gesture and these gestures repeat in my mind for days. He doesn’t come to me and I spend way too much time trying to understand why. He doesn’t come to me and so I keep my distance, too.
3. Love is a song with her name as its bassline.
I say thus and thus repeatedly and heaven smashes my words.
Love is the song I imagine he sings for her now that our time is over. Their love is all the things ours never could be. She can wear heels and still be shorter than he is. She’s safe enough for him. He’s happy to have her on his arm. He calls her. Her name brings the smile I thoguht could only be for me. They go to the movies and spend hours watching TV. She makes him dinner. He takes her to see his family. He talks to her with ease. Her name comes to him throughout he day. They shop for groceries and then make meals together. She runs her fingers through his hair.
Her song stops our song short. It replaces ours and in its absence I am left with a frozen heart.
4. Love is a song with my name as its bassline.
Look to your heart that flutters in and out like a moth…
In the end of course it’s all about me. The song I imagine you make of me is a version of myself that, good or bad, informs the way I make sense of my life. The song is one part “Project Chick” and two parts Marseillaise. It samples my voice from your answering machine so that I sing you all the things I’ve never said aloud.