Trying to sort through the recordings
Last night, I went to meet a friend at Houston’s in Metairie and I walked in at night, to see so many young faces – servers and hosts and cooks – that it brought me back to a time in my life that seems like it was someone else’s life. I worked as a server there when I was in my early twenties. It was when I was with the first love of my life. When I saw how young the servers looked, I realized just how young I was then. My friend and I sat a table and two tables down were two men dressed in suits. One of them kept looking over at our table. It made me flinch because I was remembering just a few hours earlier I had heard from a friend that she had discovered her husband had been having an affair for five years. How could he?
I looked around at the other tables – couples eating, friends talking, and the young young servers bringing us drink and food and hustling through the restaurant. I was too young then to understand what life was really all about. Later I had a glass of wine with another friend who quoted from Moonstruck when the guy is out in the streets and says we’re born, we get married and then we make a mess out of our lives and we die.* Poignant given the year has started on that note – I am now keeping a mental list of a relative whose almost 50 year marriage has broken up, a new friend with a young child who has just separated, a friend who is in the midst of discovery of infidelity, and so on.
My dreams have been all about discovery, my mother walking into the room where her clothes were and picking a dress from the closet that was obviously bought after she was dead, once she held it up and asked what we thought, we knew she would realize she was a ghost. Or another with me moving through rooms and my hair getting shorter and shorter as I glided from office to office and although I was physically changing in each situation, I proceeded as if nothing was different.
We are born, we get married, then we make a mess out of our lives and die.
*Ronny Cammareri: Loretta, I love you. Not like they told you love is, and I didn’t know this either, but love don’t make things nice – it ruins everything. It breaks your heart. It makes things a mess. We aren’t here to make things perfect. The snowflakes are perfect. The stars are perfect. Not us. Not us! We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and *die*. The storybooks are *bullshit*. Now I want you to come upstairs with me and *get* in my bed!