Scriptor Press - The ElectroLounge

In December I made an effort to produce Cenacle 47 but it did not succeed. My life
had devolved to . . . holding off a breaking heart & trying to fill an empty purse. I walked
around Portland, liking it, wishing my life in it would stabilize & lift. I wrote at bookstores,
coffeehouses, park benches, buses. I look back now on those months—time’s gone on, I’ve
been back & forth over the continent a couple of times since, better love came & stayed—&
wish I could cross back to who I was then & say: it will be OK, it will hurt, get worse, but
you will survive. You will survive . Or better yet tell him that self-preservation matters over
even the most obsessive of romances.
I wasn’t ready to admit that it was over, that my life had devolved to a sad fragment,
that will & conjuration would not turn things toward lively new days. My stubbornness cost
me a great deal but I look back without shame. Maybe that’s the odd allure of those days
still: nearing the bottom something in me fought on. I learned that I might fail but I would
not surrender. This seems important a distinction even now.
I spent Christmas Day alone in a coffeehouse called Heaven in the bleak grey,
unsnowy downtown. Read, wrote, listened to my walkman. New Year’s Eve I turned down a
friend’s invitation to go to San Francisco for a rock festival. My shitty job might call offering
hours to work. They didn’t.
To be continued in Cenacle | 55 | October 2005
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The Cenacle / 54 / April 2005