Alone Awake

And still I know that love is never free.

It bows your head and bends your knees. 

-Dessa 

I'm never more grateful to be with someone than on Sundays.

Sunday is my favorite day of the week, the day that I guard fiercely. The week is for work and errands. Friday is for opening the pressure valve in whatever way. Saturday is for crossing things off the to-do list. Sunday is for doing nothing. It's for long, relaxing bike rides. It's for lazy Sunday brunches, coffee with the paper on the porch, lounging in your pajamas.

And being with someone on a Sunday? Well, it's a bit like that old song, isn't it?

This Sunday is both different and not different. This past week was emotionally vampiric and the weekend was wonderful and exhausting. I traveled over the weekend, as I've done most weekends lately. I saw a movie that was deeply satisfying on a level I didn't realize until much later. There was a live concert that has left my voice scratchy. There were irritations too, the inability to find an apartment, the lack of sleep for three nights running, but those were mild. And now they're being quietly soothed away.

It's a bit after 9:00 and we've just gone to bed. I'm wiped out from the weekend. He recognizes that while I came home happy today, my feathers were a little ruffled from too little sleep and too much socializing. I'm also just a touch nervous about what's coming down the pike for us. Whatever we're doing, we both know that it has an expiration date. We knew it when we met for that first game of Scrabble.

 Neither of us could possibly care less.

So we've set the alarms and have crawled into bed. It's hothothot, that sticky, damp, late summer heat that makes me glad I've recently cut off all my hair and anxious to move back north. It's too warm to sleep curled together, but he's reading to me from a historical fiction novel and slowly twining my curls around his fingers.  I make a tiny, quiet noise that's somewhere between longing and contentment and somewhere in my drowsy mind I think Iamtooyoungtoappreciatethismoment. And I am right. But for now, his voice reading quietly and his fingers in my hair are the last thing I know until the alarm beeps at 8:00 am.

'Cause I didn't come to play it safe.

I came to win or lose with you.

-Dessa 

What do you give up?

I can't stop asking myself that question lately. I ask it when deciding between a ten mile road race and a duathalon in September. I ask it when packing my suitcase, thinking about the lovely cool weather I'm leaving here in North Country.

I ask t it while I'm standing in the middle of a crowd at First Avenue, watching as one of my favorite writers, one of my favorite musicians takes the stage and brings the house down.

I wanted part of this essay to be about that show. And what it was like to see an artist I admire in a venue and a city I love, with people I treasure. And I think I could have written it, if I had not trusted the intervening 48 hours to help me solidify my thoughts on it. But the more I try to write about it, the more I am frustrated by the slipperiness of words and experience. 

I am a different person after the show.

It's sounds rather grandiose. Like you should automatically dismiss everything that comes before and after because the person writing is obviously the hysterical type, and cannot be trusted to give an accurate account of what happened. She's the worst kind of unreliable narrator.

Fuck off.

It is the purpose of good art, good writing, is it not? To squirm its way subtly into our heads and hearts. To hit us across the face with a two-by-four and change how we look at something. To quietly devastate us and leave us trembling and moved and profoundly, deeply different.

But there's no sword without an edge

And I sleep uneasily when you're not in my bed. 

-Dessa

What do you give up?

I ask it while watching my friends fall in love, thinking to myself what dreams, ambition, ideals are you giving up to be with this person? Are they worth it?

And do you ever really know?

I only live alone awake,

'Cause every night, yeah, you pass through. 

-Dessa

How can it be 8 am already?

It's the first thing that pops into my mind as I reach blindly for the alarm, quietly cursing and brushing my long hair our of my eyes. It's just there, under the fictionalized account of Thomas Cromwell's life that I fell asleep reading, which is just beyond the pillow I fell asleep wrapped around. I'm a little groggy, the result of an OTC sleeping pill and nearly twelve hours of deep sleep. But when I stumble out of bed, I'm smiling. As I'm getting ready for work I try to decide what possible significance July 1st can have that dropped me out of bed in such a good mood. It's the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg? No, that's not it. One week until I meet Neil Gaiman? Possibly,  but there's a lot going on between now and then. My impending trip to St. Louis? No, I've still got to pack and travel, that seems impossibly far off.

Fully dressed and humming an Etta James song to myself, I grab my keys and my work bag and head out the door. Whatever pleasant dream or memory was there in the moments before I woke up this morning, I'm in a good mood on a Monday. I'm not about to give that up.