To Fight and Not Smother (A Myth and Legend)

I once enlisted my grandmother –we’ll call her Mema, because that is what I call her – for relationship advice. I was a senior in high school and I was in what I thought to be a very serious relationship and it wasn’t going as smoothly as I had hoped. I needed a pair of eyes who had seen hard times in love and gotten through them. I needed someone who had some sort of insight into my possible long-term relationship. She told me two things. First, never go to bed angry. Second, do not under any circumstance smother your lover.

I will never forget this and it is my inability to forget this that causes me such anguish now. I think about these two ideas for relationship strengthening. I imagine myself being both of these supposed men at the same time. It is when I do this that I realize it is impossible to do these things. It is impossible to fight through something with your significant other and not smother them. To fight is to smother. Someone somewhere is probably thinking, “of course you can, both sides make compromises and then they let the anger go”.  This person has obviously never been in a fight with their spouse.

Even when two married people look into each other’s eyes and say they’re sorry and they kiss and make up – and make up gratefully afterwards, they aren’t really saying sorry. What they are saying is I’m sorry I couldn’t out right win this battle. I will concede, if you will. A compromised is made but a battle is not won or lost, and there is no such thing as a draw in war. So then what the hell is it?

It’s none of these things and all of them at the same time. It is an ongoing struggle that, if taken far enough, will last a lifetime. This is what old couples mean when they say if you are not fighting then it’s not worth fighting for. It is because they are still fighting to this day and they have to rationalize it somehow. When you go home for Thanksgiving, and you watch your grandparents, they are in the middle of two things. They are either not talking to each other at all, or they are making little comments to each other with smiles on their faces. We smile about it longingly when we’re all out in the backyard back getting drunk saying, “Man, they still have that fire. No wonder they have been together so long”. We have failed to see it for what it really is. It is not the fire from their passion we are seeing, it’s the fire from their poison. It is a fifty year old inside joke gone wrong, that no one will understand except for them and it has been going on since the day they said I do.

The thought that two people should fight but then concede to one another is the same blind Christian bullshit that has poisoned marriage and this nation for years now. Two sides are never equal and life is not equilateral. Someone has to win. Even if you think everyone is losing, someone is winning. So while men everywhere are giving up their balls and substituting them for their wife’s purse and/or miniature poodle, I hope there is an equal if not increasing number of men giving the middle finger to the Feminist Reich. I mean have you seen the divorce rate in this country?     

Matches and Love

Life and love are like matches and flame. We burn so hard for them, yet they fitter and extinguish themselves on the brink of their creation. We can never hold on to anything eternally. We fret and blow to keep the embers burning, letting the match smolder until it touches our fingers. We eventually feel the pain of our trials. We eventually have to let go. We drop the tarnished match into oblivion, letting it be just another testament of how our love will never be complete. The pain will always be there to remind us of the previous and warn against the future. We will henceforth not bear to withstand the same pains we went through before and therefore protect ourselves from it. Will anyone ever love as fiercely as they did the first time?

In essence, we must all taste this flame. This is our journey to become complete. What we are becoming complete for, that is yet to be determined. This does not negate the fact that the first flame always burns the brightest and the hottest. We stare it right down to our torched fingertips, grimacing at the look of the flame as it burns away our prints on this world. We can smell the burning flesh and it does not deter us. It is only until someone tells us to let go that we finally release.

To anyone looking for love, and to anyone trying to figure out love, the greatest realization is that of letting go. The future will happen with you, or without you. The flame that you try so hard to care for will eventually burn out. The true task of love is excepting this. You must sit back and wish, hope that the wind will once again rekindle the spark. You may find that this spark ignites other flames or the one that was once thought to be lost.

So keep your fingers closed and you breath shallow. Let anything you have going on inside out, because how knows when the flames of the match will burn out forever.

This Guitar

I hold my guitar as I write this. The strings are greasy from use. I stop and strum a few notes until I come up with a new or reprised line.  Hit the open E and I’m on cloud nine, a place so happy it literally can’t be bought. It’s the kind of thing you have to practice over and over, until it’s all pure muscle memory. Your fingers curve over the fret board like a bridge over troubled water – Oh, Bet! These vibrations are not the poor musings of a sad life on stark white computer screen. These vibrations are what make me able to express myself freely. So I muse.

Certain things that appear in my mind, certain things that to me should be written, don’t always come out easily on paper.  They are under the cover of an opaque shroud, a mist that is discernable, but impenetrable. They must be brought from this concealment and barrier. The finger picking of an open D chord lets me pick my way through this precipitant. As I grasp what my minds has for me, I let out a sigh of relief. For the road to understanding my mind is easier than I imagined. All I have to do is sit with my wooden and metal molded friend. My fingers in comfortably memorized positions on his neck. That’s when the words and my world begin to flow as one.

I no longer look into my mind as an empty and uncharted space, an expanse too dark to see through.  Your hands disappearing, in front of your eyes, if you try to stretch your arms out any further than a half a foot. I blink my eye but can’t tell if they were ever shut, there is no differentiating in the blackness. I hear the droll of Paul McCartney’s Liverpool accent as he rides the melodies of ‘Yesterday’ and a light shines through, ripping the darkness in two. I can see the faces of all the people I have ever met and the cities I have been and someday wish to go. I can see the places I grew up more vividly than ever.

I can see me lying in my bedroom on the floor in front of my stereo, my home in Tallahassee. I have headphones on because my youngest sister was only a few months old and barely sleeping through the night. So anytime I could help out the folks by not waking the sleeping one, I was golden. I would just retire to my room, homework done or not, and disappear into the wave of sound, mostly the classics - the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Red Hot Chili Peppers, you know the kind. I would lie down and pray to whatever deity I felt gave a shit that night that I could become one of these legends. I at least prayed that I would get to at least attempt the feat of becoming famous. The closest I ever got was the Indian Brand guitar that I had begged my dad for, my very first guitar.

I held it in my lap and felt the thick heavy strings, which after months of rigorous practice switched for the light strings – less calluses. I fitted the curve of the left side of the guitar over my right leg and it magically matched up perfectly. I draped my arm over the left side of the body and began to stroke the face of the guitar. I didn’t know much about the woods that guitars are made of, and seeing as I don’t have the current profession of a guitar maker I still don’t, but I do know that the face cover was imitation. This was most easily distinguished by the seemly particleboard insides. The lesser-engineered factors of my present didn’t deter me from the simple enjoyment of it. I held up the neck with an upward facing palm. I flung my hand toward the horizontal strings. My right forefinger and thumb touching each other as they are poised for their attack. I use my fingernail as a pick and depress none of the strings up the fret board – my first note. An open resonating note enters my room and my dad opens my door and smiles.

“You like it?”

“Hell, yeah!”

“Good.”

The first song I learned was ‘Act Naturally’ – The Beatles. The second song I learned was ‘And I Love Her’. Since those first songs much has happened to me, but just like that first memory, the other memories are recovered and easily recounted. The chords of ‘Greens Eyes’ by Coldplay bring me back to serenades on the beach in Sullivan’s Island. My wife’s face reflected in the moon’s surface. Certain nights I couldn’t keep my eyes off her, other nights my hands. As I sang every love song I could think of, along with a special song I learned just for her – ‘Secret’ by Maroon 5 (yeah, I know. Get over it!).  This was what connected us in the first place. These spell casted night are bound together with steely notes and sea breeze. Love was born of these two. It was their power that drove us to our happy life together. The guitar bore the notes and the world bore the other half.

The song ‘Karate’ by Tenacious D and pretty much any song by Rage Against the Machines, brings back good times with good people and shitty alcohol. Nights that I wasn’t sure how I got home or where exactly home was in reference to my head. Several carpet stains are a testament to this. How I didn’t die back then I would surely like to know. Music blaring so loud you couldn’t hear yourself think, only the thoughts brought on through a subliminal frequency. Only the words ‘don’t trust the government, only trust yourselves’ emblazoned in my brain. A chant that, when repeated, becomes more of a mantra. The meaning lost in its multiplication. But, the feeling of those nights that turned into days will never leave.

‘Sorry About That’ by Alkaline Trio, makes me think of a lost love.

‘The Dance’ by Garth Brookes, brings thoughts of my parents.

‘Stay Together For the Kids’ by Blink-182, again thoughts of my parents.

I now put down my guitar and lay my fingers on the keyboard. The memories, which are merely refracted images of my possible future, are still fresh. My first keystroke will begin my purging of these and lead me to my mountain of understanding. This is where I will sit and reflect. Epiphanies will come and go like schools of Minos and I will let them slip through my fingers and toes, catching every one in a hundred. I don’t know where this road or my inner sight will take me, but this guitar will lead the way.