Tales Of The Gurrier

Ten years ago I sat in a park and started a notebook. I was twenty years old. I sat in that park again today, ten years to the day, in the same spot, with the same notebook. In the decade since there have been other notebooks, half filled and half forgotten, but this one I come back to, year over year, and always I resisted it’s completion. This one is special. This one, where I recorded my few truths and came to explore old pain and test the scabs and deep scars with lovers fingers.

I am returned here today to fill the last of those pages. What will I say? That it was a good ten years, all in all. That I lived and loved and broke my heart and found true love, and drank a thousand nights away and let good true friends slip away and lingered nights with strangers. And supped wine and traded lives with new friends but not enough, not nearly enough. And let a violent act fester in my heart and blacken me and twist me up, and let other innumerable petty acts taint me. And let young hopes fade, but not too much. And came at last through those long nights to a place and a peace that’s mine.

And yet. Where are the stories I wished to tell, where are the lives I wished to touch. Where in those ten years did I record my grand visions?

Well, here I suppose, and there, and in the gaps and crevices of people’s lives. In the nooks and crannies where they store those pieces of us we leave behind. Our smells, our speech, our indelible human stains. I hear them all, all those friends and lovers, those brief members of our changing clans. I catch a glance, a sight, a smell, a word or two here and there, and suddenly they are in my midst. The living, the dead, all the ghosts of our lives.

So I close the book on this a brief collection of pages today, put final end to the thoughts I record there, but nothing changes, it’s just a day, just a notebook. I am just another citizen enjoying the weather.

But tomorrow, tomorrow I think I’ll start a new one.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 16th, 2007 at 11:32 pm and is filed under Bloggery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.