Only Yesterday

It suddenly hit me that the boy on the screen is only eighteen - well within my reach. This is my world now - it's not just something off in the distance I can barely see. (And yet that night so long ago when I shimmied innocently and was told I should learn to dance was really only yesterday.)

I've filled notebook after notebook with this glittering trash. There is nothing more concrete and nothing more abstract. I remember when I was told I should really get it published and I laughed (and wondered if it would ever really happen). (Remember when 'social commentary' used to be called 'bitching in your journal'?)

I'm shivering fever-cold as I recall who I used to be and look at who I am now. Have I really changed? (Duh.) But it all comes full circle far too often. (He used to be the boy on the bus I'd look at before smiling to myself.) History is a loop or, at least, a spiral.

The boy on the screen who cries like an artist is really just a reflection of me, roller coaster of body language heart pinned to his sleeve. You want to reach out and touch every wry smile, because you had that thought too, so long ago, only yesterday.

I laugh because I still write poetry - or maybe it's that I only ever wrote prose. Whichever way it happens, it's still where you can find the meat of things - all the overblown pretense, and delusions, and buried deep inside a set of parentheses... (the truth). Though if I recall, I didn't like those all that much back then.

I swore I'd stop writing these, but I missed them too much. (I suppose what is real and powerful inside us can be neither hidden, nor disguised, nor repressed.) I just want to be honest.

So let's say it.

I am lonely.

But I am not depressed. (I gave up on the idea of bleeding grey a long time ago - but then again, it was only yesterday.)

I am vivacious and flirtatious, and when I see the people I used to know, I tend to clam up and laugh to myself. Not because (as I claim) I see all the layers of irony, but because I want to make them think I'm interesting. (I've always tried too hard to make that third impression.)

And they lean their heads in close as the camera catches the flickering end of a caress. They're only eighteen. (I wish you could rewind real life to see these moments.) Good Goddess, they are only eighteen.

I sleep with a stuffed frog that an ex-boyfriend gave me (so long ago, on a bus - no, I guess it wasn't yesterday), not because it reminds me of him, but because it reminds me of his quirky best friend. Bless you, Buddha - why did one of those quirks have to be the habit of not wearing a seat belt? (I suppose all this really comes back to you and John and Jesus.)

Yeah, I'm crying. I have been since before that boy said, "Get off of me." There is some strange drive within that won't let me stop, won't let me sleep. There's all this remembering, all this thinking I still have to do. (Oh, great. We're back to that vague sense of rhyming rhythm once again.) I think there's no such thing as a crazy random (ironic) happenstance. There's always a reason. (I'll swear he's timing the intervals between each wall post.)

You want nothing and you want everything. You want "one." (Remember that conversation we had yesterday about second person?) So make up your mind. There isn't a way to have both, no balancing point to stick your rapier-sharp wit into and see the hilt quiver. There is only "get off of me" and "she really has a secret crush on me." (Whirls of interrelated intricacies.)

There will always be the 'suppose's. Even though I want to stop dealing in those. (Let me take my glasses off.) So, I suppose it was a long time ago, when I stood in a circle and shimmied innocently. And I suppose I can count back the years and find that they aren't as many as I first felt. I suppose it was really only yesterday. (Good God, he's only eighteen, that fellow there, on the tv screen!)