63
It’s funny how it happens.
One morning at a time you feel just a little bit better than the one before.
It’s cliché as hell but it’s true, time heals all wounds.
Here’s the thing, the wheel keeps turning.
Before you know it, you’re eating full meals and you’re going to work, and you’ve got yourself distracted again.
You’re filling your time with beer and conversation and you’re letting laughter win again and again.
Your best friends are rallied, all encouraging the healing, and it happens.
But for me, most of all, every morning when I open my eyes, Rose is the first thing I see.
Peaceful and dreaming.
There is nothing more healing than waking to the world in the arms of someone that has your heart.
She alone helped me greet many gray dark days.
I’d softly kiss her good morning and we’d whisper gentle nonsense to one another.
Other times we’d laugh quietly, stretching and slowly moving our bodies awake.
Sometimes we’d make love.
Her breath and mine, her life and mine.
I crave her touch.
It heals me day after day.
It makes sense to me, in the end, that as long as you are together, moving forward with someone you adore, one tiny inch at a time, everything will be okay.
There is still so much and so many to love, and that, in itself, is worth it.
Night could have taken any of us, but it hadn’t yet.
On we go.
One day turns into another, then another and another until you wake up one morning and there’s a couple feet of snow on the ground and you’re believing in all sorts of ways forward.
Somewhere in these mornings, these long days of thinking, dreaming, and healing, I’ve somehow got it in my mind again that I need to go.
I’m not sure where, but it’s in me, stronger than before.
There are spirits in my house.
Maybe they need the roost for a while.
But where to? Rose is finally all settled in at Jimmy’s and really loving her time there.
Saul has given her more and more control and she’s making all sorts of friends at the bar.
I don’t think I have to explain how everyone at that place goes wild over a girl like her.
Some nights of her random choosing, she’d break out her guitar in the late a.m.
hours and play for whichever lonely hearts were left there to hear it.
To see her in the bar light, strumming and singing like Joni herself, changes me.
Her soulful voice fills holes in my heart.
I couldn’t be more on fire.
I could watch her for hours and hours.
Rose is so beautiful, it makes you more spiritual.
She’s grounded but somehow, free.
Tough but gentle; funny but straight.
Her dualities inspire me.
She’s the biggest damn hit Johnston has ever seen in its life.
God, how I adore her.
I’m falling in love with her, and she knows it.
She must know it.
She is a piece of Johnston now.
She is happy.
So, I stow away my thoughts of departure.
I’m in no kind of rush.
I buried my father out in Johnston Cemetery next to my mother, a few miles from my house.
I stand with my father’s jacket cloaked around me looking down at both my parents, trying to convince myself it will all be okay.
I leave flowers on their graves.
I run my fingers in a cross on their tombstones.
I never want to stay for too long…
I’m driving home with Rose in the passenger seat. I’m holding her hand. Even in the winter we keep the windows cracked. The fresh December air is like nothing else. She scratches some white paint off my right thumb nail which is still coated on there from work I’d done this morning. Dave Matthews is playing on CD. She sings along and I can’t help but follow her lead. We sing about playing time, dancing through troubles, and finding our way out.
Later, Rose gets out her guitar. I make a fire and the smoke curls up through the chimney, the heat fills the whole wooden house. In her blue socks and sweatshirt, she strums fine as ever. God. When Rose sings it, I care about nothing else, no other voice or sound will do.
She shares her soul, taking the feeling from centuries past and bringing the future with too, the way all special musicians do. Countless decades layer her voice. She plays it so raw, calmly and true. She plays for an hour, and I don’t want her to stop.
“One more Rose, one more…”
She smiles bashfully and continues. Sitting by the fire in the freezing winter evening, I think about asking her to marry me here and now. It’s the first time I’ve ever had that thought in my life. I can’t help it.
“What are you smiling at?” she asks.
“Nothin,” I say.
And I crawl up to her legs where she sits.
I hug them tightly to my chest and try to freeze time.