It’s been a long time coming,
It’s been a long time runnin’.
The Tragically Hip
Yes to both.
I knew it was coming.
Just a tiny taste that I still exist in someone else’s universe.
The Hulk sat on my porch in the fall and mentioned he and a friend had been talking about me, I had a thinking out loud moment where I said “I forget I exist to people when I am not around”.
It’s true. I carry all these memories and there is some kind of disconnect where I do truly believe they are just stories I tell myself. That I never mattered and still don’t.
Every once in a while something happens that reminds me this is less than true.
The the Giant showed up at work, said he thought about me every day.
I was down to about once a week with him. Always lyrically/musically triggered.
Then I walked into the tattoo shop where I got my crotch branded with the Poet’s words, took a quick look on insta and lo, there I was.
I stopped looking, for a good long while.
Something whispered in my ear that it was a good time to peek.
I was poised and ready for the alternate piece of footwear to succumb to gravity. Wolfling and Gelfling been haunting my insta too. Random hearts on this or that. S’okay. One of them I know has a new girl and the other…I hope so. He needs consistent, unconditional love more than me even, and we all know that is a metric shit tonne.
Never did know how to run from them…him especially, the Poet him. Always just stood my ground, truth be told it was never my ground. I just stood still. Figured someone like him who had never known home needed something steadfast and familiar to return to when he got tired of running.
But I never had that either.
For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
For every trauma there are two possible outcomes. Become what hurt you or become what you needed.
I am what I needed.
I am home.
He emulates Oppenheimer I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.
The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.
He is the eternal pessimist. I am the optimist.
I love.
He runs away from home.
But you held your course to some distant war
In the corners of your mind
From the second time around
The only love I ever found
Oh Angela it’s a long time coming
Home at last
Were you safe and warm in your coat of arms
With your fingers in a fist
Did you hear the notes, all those static codes
In the radio abyss?
It’s my new earworm. Angela by the Lumineers. It is leaking into everything I write, think and do.
I keep listening to this over and over. My head messes with the most important lyric…
Home at last becomes hope it lasts.
I’m the first to admit, I am damaged from before. I can feel us so clearly in another universe where this worked out and we lived happily ever after that the separation is felt heavily in this one.
But it’s not this one.
In this one I have been left to write my own endings.
In this one I love one more time, and find myself home at last.
