Sanctuary

The friend I love is beside me now. She looks at me in the near-darkness of her room with wonderful eyes, dark but glowing like the stars. They reflect truth, the only truth that doesn’t make me sick with despair. It leads me back to the place that rights all the wrongs. This life, no longer the crime or the cage, becomes a possibility to see those eyes, to be here with her in this sacred reality. And what more could anyone really ask for that to be confronted with that?
My friend is a sanctuary, an armistice in a life that’s been nothing short of total war with no conceivable end. My mind is a war zone. I’m sick. It’s been this way for a long time. I came here, to the south, trying to get off the front lines, out of the trenches. Now I know that in running away I only found another front, another theater of strife. Break and run in another direction and there’s just more of the same. I’m hemmed in on all sides and the circle seems to be tightening. Bombardment rages on every hour of the day and night. But my friend calms it down, even if just for these few days we are here together. Anywhere she is, there’s home.
She’s the best ace up my sleeve. I’d like to think that when it’s all going wrong, desperately wrong, I could go to her. It’s been this way for a couple of years now, back and forth between Tennessee and Colorado.
Once she gave me a book of Emerson’s Essays. I told her it was like medicine for my sickened heart -but she’s better medicine. In looking across a crowded room at her, it’s then I know I am not alone. Not alone at all.
Being beside her here, on the streets of this unlikely town, this town I scorned forever, I catch a glimpse of the life want. There’s an easy perfection in the hours, rest in the company of someone who really is one of us. How could it be that I lived this many years without ever knowing this simple triumph?
Later on, the night turns cold. We sit on a second floor Balcony overlooking one of the more picturesque streets in Memphis. We’re up in the branches of a great old magnolia tree. We drink red wine and smoke cigarettes. Warm light from inside the living room glows on us through an open door. This is one of the best pleasures of the south, the slow nights and magnolias, the fact there’s no place at all to get to.
I have three days with my friend. Three days to find forever.

Memphis
10/30/09