Comeback

Then suddenly, after a long, cold absence, it's here again.  

It's hard to explain how you know when it's back.  First of all it's just a feeling, a kind of inner shift like a loosening of the bowels, an itch, a hum at the back of the mind.

It starts to build and will not be resisted. Words are sprouting everywhere and cannot be held back.  They take up all the headspace and start spilling out onto scraps of paper, the notepad on the phone, demanding to get onto the page. Insistent, relentless.

I am beginning to think that I understand why this happens. I hold myself tightly closed so much of the time. Safe. Nothing can get in that way. Romping around inside my submarine, closed away in the dark depths.  You can't see in, you can't get to me.

But nothing inside can get out, either. 

So now I am uncoiling again, opening up. What was a fist, fingernails cutting tight into palms, is uncurling. It's been taking a while, but it's here now. Sunshine helped, and some other things.  I'm welling up in a surge of turquoise waves, a breaking of buds, a crescendo. 

Day. Break.

Takes a while, doesn't it, to get the hang of this life-malarkey.

A man can wake up one morning with a hard-on, and two fried duck-eggs smiling up at him from his plate like twin sunshines.  But not that much later, the paramedics can't resuscitate his dad, and he has to take a drive through the hills to a place he's never experienced before. 

So how can we make it bearable, this long slide from the light to the darkness?  Let's dance through the dull drag of days - hug and help one another, work and write, flirt and fuck. Do something - that's the thing to do. 

A time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and time to dance.