And Then My Heart Stood Still

Having gotten character assassination out of my system, I will now return to a more pleasant disposition, begging the reader's pardon in the meantime for what may appear to have been a less than kind attitude toward my father-in-law.

For there is this to be considered: Without Nico there would have been no Sant Louis, and without Sant Louis there would have been no life left to me for the duration of this ever contracting time in the world that remains.

To this I was resigned, back in the old year, 2005. Two marriages had turned hard, like bread left too long in the air, and finally crumbled. The hungry abundance of unearned comfort had swallowed itself, knowing not what else to do with pain, for the effort of love seemed unlikely to provide an equal satiety.

My life simply disappeared.

And I found myself in a two room apartment overlooking the transit center, leaning hard toward the tracks. I and my dog.

There was nothing in me, for it had all slipped away in the vacuum that had taken everything else, and I found myself profoundly displaced, in body, in heart, in soul, in time. Grasping for some kind of mnemonic, I returned to drinking vodka. It was at least familiar. Maybe that was me, for I remembered it. After ten years of exotic travel, and then shipwreck, here was something which at least had remembered me.

Sometimes I would walk to the Fred Meyer store. Sometimes I would take the train downtown. For dinner I ate Asian food that came dry in small packages, a meal in one box. I would rent movies. I remembered being scared after watching The Grudge, and holding the dog close all night long.

What is frightening in and of itself grows huge, unspeakably terrifying, on a diet of ghosts and silence, alienation, regret.

I drank instead--for alcohol is the only substance that is consumable by the soul.

And then all of a sudden she was there. Just there. I know now, of course, that she came from somewhere--it seems that everyone does--and yet that one night, that first night, she was simply there, just as if she had peeked out from my own inner emptiness, a single surviving smile, and winked at me.

I took one look at you,
that's all I meant to do,
and then my heart stood still!

So goes the old Rogers and Hart song. And so it was. I might have thought that my heart had already been standing still, and yet it had not been still at all. It was my life that had been still, or maybe my hope or my faith.

One enchanted evening.

Another song.

Why did she look at me in the first place? Why did she smile. What was it that activated the effort in her to cross the room in order to talk to me?

In any case, I was from that moment lost, and therefore found.

My feet could step and walk,
my lips could move and talk,
and yet my heart stood still!

And I love you, Louis. More than anything in the world.