Genevieve leaves the Guf
The world…life…is filled with sudden and loud endings that force us to face new beginnings. If not for these events many of us would have certainly found much easier or at the very least more appealing paths through life. It is not to be so. It is these constant concussions sometimes seen and sometimes seen and denied that are woven in blood and tears through the fabric of our life. It is this cloak we wear that becomes heavier with the blood, darker absent the life and less colorful as we age. It is the face that people put upon us drawn in crayon like blue clowns poorly traced in a toddler’s coloring book; and all from their own, very carefully sallied chair looking out their personally arranged window to gaze upon their very particular lawn revealing to them a uniquely packaged kind of world.
Then there are the people who dance across the top of your life and tickle you with their laughter.
The special few that comfort you with their love and boost you with their support.
They are the laughers, the talkers, the care-givers the special bonds that make life so wonderfully artful.
So important they are like your special secret – Oh how could she see me as so wonderful…I know what I am…dare I tell her? She knows and that’s what makes her so important…
The kind of important you tuck so perfectly and neatly away in the very near fold of your heart. There her song is always sung and private moments are continually replayed - forever.
How many times did we say that? How many times did we forget? How much of that matters when it really is the music of your voice I so desire? Did I call you last or did you call me? How did I get to be so special to someone so special to me?
The child and the lady…The sister and the friend. Of course I loved her…she was the only one who accepted me with all the dents, dings and doubts that I clumsily dragged about. But whatever else I know, I know a secret that I can now share. She was exactly who she needed to be, to be the best she could be to every person who needed to lean in her direction and she did it with grace and a truthfulness that made you believe that no matter what…in her eyes you were just fine.
All the louder and more devastating the concussion. If you wake up on some every other morning and the world is missing a particular sound that even though you heard it very seldom, still it meant so much to you that you instantly know your world is quieter, less colorful, sadder. Something really valuable and important is gone. Not a piece of the pissing random muddle of human defecation that smolders over liquored up foul-ty or the rum-a-dum-dum of the next big deal…
No, this is that very special song that is as much a remnant of the tune you made as it is the one you made together…. A sound that if it could be seen would glitter like gold, taste like the finest of wines and the sweetest of cakes. It is a visceral element of being who you are and what you are to the secret you that only you know lives inside your broken shell…and to all those “other” people and most especially other people like her. Only the few are able to achieve such a vital and wondrous place inside you. A place that when you open it’s hearts door to listen in, however rarely, you were properly jerked from the patter of your silly scurry to know that marvelous melody over and over again.
Then that concussion. It hits so hard. It doesn’t care about night or day, cold or hot, near or far –BOOM- and the world grows eerily quiet as you adjust to a new world. Something important has ceased to be a part of the music that created the equanimity that balanced your oddly shaped life. It is a silence that drowns out all the other music that you might hear. It is a noise that scratches across the surface of your skin and makes you shutter to the bone. It is everything about living and dying that we so oddly stuff away from sight…until the BOOM.
It isn’t the loss that you fear. It isn’t the impact that it will selfishly have on your life. It is the realization that the sound you once danced to was far more important than the force march your life and body continually sustain for purposes that are of far less value and when weighed and measured come up wanting and are at best, queer. You would have been wiser to embrace that dance – especially for the part of me in which she resided.
An hour ago a phone rang. A voice of someone I used to know and still love weeping- a person who had taken responsibility for keeping that wonderful music in my life for so long. I heard the music pass away even before she blurted it out between her suffocating sighs. One light goes out and many others are in their own way forever dimmer. The music that once held a place in my mind where I could go to when I needed to hear her song is yet another hole in my soul. I will cling desperately to the memory of her face, laugh, touch, song and kiss but they will go to grey before long; until the day we are once again allowed to play together and make a whole new kind of music. Along with this comes the death of that part of who I am and more importantly who she is inside me. Now it becomes the concussion that moves me either to the left or the right – subtly or dramatically to another destination I could not have anticipated.
Another soul leaves the Guf. Another time Gabriel will reach into the treasury. One more minute we are all closer to becoming a concussion in someone’s life. A moment in time when our song becomes more fleeting to some and more important to others–
Our light a bit dimmer and burning more brightly depending on every facet and which way we turn our face.
It is a symphony and each note is connected to the last and to the next.
It is a dance that we all dance by ourselves and all together.
It is every twist and turn whether we race or pace, run or crawl, scream or whisper, sing or curse, love or hate.
It is the scent of every move, every note which will waft across your silly little galaxy drenching those closest and sprinkling just a twinkle on those who revolve in the furthest away rings of the air – the atmosphere of our own magical privacy.
SHE WAS A GIANT CONCUSSION.
There is a screaming silence from the music I allowed her to occupy in my sad, little and lonely kingdom. I can feel myself and others so intimately connected and so foreign to my life already changing our dance. As they dance away I can only pray that their lives are absent too many of these monstrous shockwaves .
I have designed my life to avoid as many of these as possible. Of course the tradeoff is that I will not create much of one on my own on that strange and certain someday when my soul drifts from the Guf and into the Hand of my Lord.
God Bless
