I Was Born To Be With You

By

First published.  October 4, 2013




A lonely violin plays behind the snowdrifts, and a sad three measures later a finely tuned piano fills the empty spaces. Her sweet fragrance wafts across the winter dusk, and every breath comes out as a pale vapor cloud that hangs in the air between him and the vacant place next to him on the bench. Noisy crowds interrupt his reverie and explode like Christmas fireworks: daughters and brothers, uncles and wives, dearest friends, punks and families, thieves and distant professors from nearby schools, all of them occupied and looking down. He looks up and thinks about her . . .


. . . oh, God, how he thinks about her!


Nearby a happy girl and clever boy huddle in each other’s arms, blind to strangers, to the glassy barren branches and icy paths before them, and plan to take a ride under blankets in a carriage. The night lights of the city look like heaven the way he used to dream it, and a plane overhead scatters angels. Skaters glide to organ tunes, but he just sits and thinks about her . . .


. . . he always thinks about her.

A calliope refuses pain, an old man shuffles by looking for a partner, someone to smoke a pipe and play a game of chess. Taxicabs go honking by, and the park gets darker by the hour. People in their woolen coats take photographs and hide themselves inside themselves, pretending to love and wanting love, afraid to lose the way the other sees them. Selfishness disguised as selflessness, they hold on tightly and won’t let go, charity bells ring all around the park, homeless men on every corner look for Oz and find only him, and all he can tell them is how much he thinks about her . . .


. . . how hard it is to stop thinking about her. How he never wants to stop thinking about her.


No one asks or thinks about her, not the clowns that ride the carrousel and make ballon animals for dancing girls, not the doormen who brave the cold holding big brass doors for businessmen and wealthy whores, not single secretaries, not the student with his college books, nor the satisfied working woman who casts them all disdainful looks. None of them understands or even knows why he thinks about her . . .


But even though no one he knows thinks about her, because they don’t know about her, he takes his time and thinks about her. Remembers her. Misses her. Knows someday he’ll be with her.


The lonely violin plays on, silently a new snow falls, the old man sits at the chessboard and checkmates himself. The boy and girl kiss one last time and run to catch a cab. A coed finds the student with the books and they hail a horse-drawn carriage, going for a ride around the park while snow-dimmed lights penetrate the dark, and the strangers in their woolen coats drift down the boulevard pretending to believe the lies they’ve spun in their minds, going home with lovers they won’t really miss when they wake up from their sleepless dreams. He wonders what she’d say if she were here, wonders if it matters that after all these years he waits for her, still wants her, still needs her. Wonders if he’ll always think about her, if she ever thinks about him.






Every breath comes out a wispy cloud and hangs in the air between him and the vacant place on the bench, the lonely violin plays behind the drifts, and a tattooed hobo walking by mumbles, “‘I was born to be with you.’ She says to tell you, ‘I was born to be with you.’”


He places his arm across the back of the snow-blanketed bench and pretends to pull her close, to keep her warm, and plans a ride. A cab, a carriage . . . a chariot to the sky. He says with the barest half smile to the cold and hollow wintry night, “I was born to be with you, too. I was born to be with you.”

Popular posts from this blog

“Confused and Wanting It To Go Away.”

By
Image
The following text thread speaks for itself. My youngest, now 20, is staying with his grandparents for a couple of weeks before he flies to Maryland to help me move back to Texas. It began with me asking how things were going. Son - Things are fine, time is moving pretty fast but it’s amazing how slow this year has felt. I feel like I can remember something about every week since early February. I’m not the only one who thinks this year resembles 1968 fairly closely. Me -   I heard a historian on NPR today say that the recent events reminded him of 1968 also. The major difference, he said, is that   this time people have time to get involved because they’re unemployed or on lockdown, out of school, etc. Son -    I wouldn’t want to erase this period away, it’s been incredible to see. You no longer can claim “blah, blah we all got involved   back in the day, none of you youngsters protest.” I’d be out there if I wan’t living out of my suitcases pinned between family   memb
Read more

Friends

By
Image
          I mentioned in my last post that I've been away from social media-- my blog and Facebook in particular --for the last eight months. I said I had my reasons. I said I wasn't sure I wanted to be back. I'm not very comfortable around people, even less so in forum where I can't see their faces or hear their voices. I need to look into a person's eyes to know whether they care, whether they're telling the truth. But my instincts (my spirit guide?) suggested it was time to give it a try, so I'm giving it a try. For a while.           I am not the kind of person who makes friends easily. I am not one who turns heads when I enter a room. I am the kind of person, it seems, who has a quiet impact on the people I meet. They don't notice me until I'm gone. And that's okay. My ex-wife always used to say that I am the kind of person who craves attention and "attaboys," but that when they come I don't want them. I run from the spotlight
Read more

Hey, Wide Load, You’re Tilting the Plane!

By
Image
REVOLUTION, I SAY!   It’s time to stuff the profit-swollen airline swine back down into the deep dark corporate pit where they belong! Time to put the genie back in the bottle and cork it forever! Listen. Over the years I’ve flown quite a few times. Many times, in fact. I’ve flown all over the United States and I’ve flown internationally. As of this writing I’ve flown to, I think, 23 countries, plus any number of times internally in several of those countries. The most harrowing of all those internal flights was in 1986 on an Air India jet from Arusha, Tanzania, to Kigali, Rwanda. We’d only been in the air for about an hour and weren’t terribly high above the mountains when there was a sudden boom! and a great shuddering of the entire plane. For half a minute the cabin rocked and vibrated to the sound of grinding gears. It scared the hell out of me, but none of the flight crew seemed particularly alarmed— maybe that sort of thing was a common occurrence for Air India, I don’t know —bu
Read more

LSD And Looking For An Angel

By
Image
“I believe that there is a hidden hero in every man and a hidden angel in every woman.”   She calls herself Lili, though that’s not her real name.  I do not know Lili. We haven’t met— not yet. To tell you the truth, I’m not even sure what she looks like. Yes, I’ve seen photographs of her, but they were rather dark and pixilated, and that, I think, was intentional. She says she doesn't feel comfortable presenting pictures of herself in public, but I guess in this circumstance she felt she had to. What’s speaking to me about this odd beginning to what, perhaps, may eventually evolve into a genuine friendship, or even relationship, is that it speaks of a certain humility on her part not often found in others. This may well be a time when I will be forced to accept the person based upon who she is on the inside before I find myself drawn to what I see on the outside. You know that old war horse: accept me for who I am . That’s tough to do when you’re immediately distracted by the costu
Read more

New Beginnings

By
Image
        Marcher seul sur la route.         It means “walking the road alone.”         Starting back in 2011 or 2012, somewhere in there, I created my first blog site. It was called Pouring Music From a Cup and its banner photograph was the view from the top of Guadalupe Peak, the highest point in Texas. You may remember it.        A few years later I put a collection of my blog posts together, 42 of them, and self-published the collection in a book also called Pouring Music From a Cup . The cover of the book was c reated by a young artist named Summer Westover, and it looked like this:        However, like the blog, I chose to put the book to sleep last autumn. The reasons don’t matter. The point is, the book is resting comfortably on Amazon, along with my other books, and won’t awaken again until it is kissed by a beautiful wandering princess. You can’t see or buy any of my books with the lone exception of a little horror novella I wrote called Jellybeans, Curse of
Read more

(For Janna) Can You Miss a Ghost?

By
Image
Can you miss a ghost?            Yes. If you are a regular reader of The Enchanted Forest, you know that I write about some quirky and esoteric subjects, often juxtaposing two unlikely sisters side by side to illustrate my point. And I always have a point, even if it may not be clear at first. Or at all. More than any other topic, though, I write about the most common theme in the universe, Love. I can’t help it. It’s been an obsession with me as far back as I can remember, which means at least since I was three or four years old. I’ve written about my personal failures and conquests with Love, my near misses (pun intended) with Love, and my dreams and fantasies about Love. I have made it something of a mantra for my own dispirited spirit: I’m in love with the idea of being in Love. For whatever reason, though, large swaths of the population have become so allergic to uncomfortable conversations about Love they’ve opted out of them completely. Too often I’ve exposed my heart and sou
Read more

Repetitively Redundant Phrases That Should Be Drawn and Quartered

By
Image
  Let me confess at the outset: I love the English language. Not because it’s my native tongue, although that’s certainly part of its allure, but because its rich palette derives from so many other languages. Unlike any other language in the world, English is malleable, eminently fluid and versatile. Like any other language it has rules and it has exceptions to those rules. It has its variations, contradictions, idioms, dialects, and is utterly confusing with its hundreds of homonyms, homophones, and inconsistent spellings. Then again, like the artist’s palette that has many tints and tinctures of every color paint, the possible combinations of those colors is endless.    Words and sentences are my passion, my comfort; I dare not abuse them. They are my intellectual children. I feel protective and nurturing toward our language. For this reason I wrote a blog a few weeks back titled “Words and Phrases That Should Be Tortured and Killed.” It wasn’t an exhaustive list, but it got the trai
Read more

Have a Good One!

By
Image
     Okay, let me start by saying that it’s not your fault. You didn’t start the trend. You were an innocent by-hearer. You heard the word or phrase, it seemed to fit the occasion or the moment; it was easy and convenient to use; you didn’t have to think about it or say anything else; and best of all, it was understood and accepted by those around you. You simply did what most people do: you went along with what was popular, you followed the crowd. Maybe— just maybe —you didn’t know any better.       I’m talking about common but incredibly annoying words and phrases everyone seems to use. Not to be confused with cringe-worthy clichés and vapid platitudes which, as soon as you hear them, send you scurrying for intellectual cover, these infuriating words and phrases are not in and of themselves offensive or even bothersome. It has more to do with the way they are used by their unaware, and too often, blatantly ignorant user. If you are a frequent user of any of these words and/or idioms,
Read more

Teachers — Locked and Loaded

By
Image
Maybe it began with Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold when they marched into Columbine High School on April 20, 1999, armed like G4S Security mercenaries and killed twelve students, one teacher, and wounded twenty-one others before, thankfully, ending themselves. Maybe it was the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre that occurred on December 14th, 2012, when, for whatever deranged reason, 20-year-old Adam Lanza walked into the school and killed 26 people, twenty of the them children between six and seven years old. Maybe it was the public outrage that at these and what seems like an endless stream of school shootings before and since. But somewhere in the reactionary cauldrons of American public rhetoric the idea of arming teachers bubbled to the surface. Put guns in the hands of teachers, proponents said, and any would-be assailant will think twice about entering a school, knowing that staff members in that building are also armed and can respond with deadly force.   They called it a det
Read more

Words and Phrases That Should Be Tortured and Killed

By
Image
Okay, I get it. Language is derivative; language is fluid and ever-changing, adapting to the times. Cool. Far out. Totally. Choice. P honus-balonus (bet you don’t recognize this one, do you? It’s from the 1920s; means nonsense or, more colloquially, “bullshit.”).   I also get slang, idioms, dialect, colloquialisms, and all the lingual variations that verbal communication implies. I understand that, like, the vast majority of us are not, like, linguists, or writers or, in these times of social media, even, like, literally, decent texters or bloggers.   And I think it’s, like, a generally accepted fact of life and society— any society —that most people are, like, at best only okay talkers. Which is to say, most people talk like they drive: only aware of themselves, in a hurry and unconcerned with how they get there, careless, oblivious, ignorant of the “rules of the road.” Oratorically, they don’t care how air-headed they sound if the person they’re talking to gets the idea. ‘Long as yo
Read more