Transcendental Equinox

Thursday afternoon on a rainy day.  My small slit of a window reveals to me the same view I've seen forever, it seems.  It is late and almost everyone is gone now.  There is only the sound of the fan and Billie Holiday singing "Blue Moon" while I work and think.  Mostly think.  I remember you when you first walked in my door, just when I needed you.  Hope.  Later, in despair, I looked through that same window listening to the same music.  Life changes, but some moods do not.  Some things are eternal for awhile.  Profane transcendence.

Today I walked into a fine arts theater filled with young female choral groups.  My friend warned me not to go saying it smelled of lilacs and bubblegum.  I did not go until late afternoon.  It smelled horribly like sweat and a first menstrual cycle.  By then tired and bored adolescent girls were sliding down banisters and pulling up dresses.  As I walked through, the prettiest of them looked me dead in the eye waiting for a reaction.  "Am I pretty?" their eyes despaired with tremulous ferocity.  To let them know would be sudden and certain doom.  Male chorus directors talked with groups of young girls nervously, eyes furtively jumping about the room from their familiar adolescent charges to the mothers who had come as well.  Stereotypes don't come out of nothing.  These pale, pudgy, nervous men spoke in a teenage dialect that was not natural.  They were scared, tired, and hideous.

Rather than go to the gym, I worked late so that I would not be tempted.  My shoulder is beginning to feel better with rest, and now I think I could rest forever.  I will have to make myself go from now on.  I could forego it now easily forever.

And so to the liquor store and the grocery store, driving through rain.  The night before the equinox.  Autumn.

*     *     *     *     *     

Rainy autumn morning, the first of the year.  Where I live, it is not April that mixes memory with desire.  Autumn is strong and powerful in memories.  We'll walk down that path once again.  Eternally.