Edges

beginnings, endings, wanting more

 The Beginning of the End

I came out of a meeting this afternoon to find it'd rained. Surprise rain in the desert is like coming across a friend you never thought you’d see again. It’s hard for a rain cloud to sneak up on a sky so wide open. There’s no place to hide. 

When it happens, it shifts reality. Like when you go into a movie theater in daylight, and after being transported somewhere else by story, emerging a little disoriented into a dark world that was light when you left it. 

The surprise rain smelled so good. Creosote. One of the deserts deep magics. The temperature had dropped—a mercy—and for a moment I was transported away from the relentless ache of these days by my own senses clocking the change in atmosphere. I felt light. Unencumbered. Hopeful. Like myself but newer. Shined up.

I drove home with the windows down. Stevie Nicks singing about the edge of 17—the beginning of everything. How many times have I heard that song? And in so many places—a college dorm room; through thumping speakers in a tricked out desert Toyota run far up a sandy wash; from a ridiculously huge boombox thundering on someone's dusty tailgate at a 1980-something Schnebly Hill camping trip; around a fire with a coven of girls I was lucky enough to call friends. 

All those edges came rushing in the open windows, through the speakers, on the static, atmospheric skin of surprise desert rain. Old ghosts of me dancing on the edge of 17. The beginnings of everything.  

I wiped salt pools from my jawline at a traffic light, feeling suddenly exposed with the windows open and the radio loud. Cars suddenly too close to my tender memories. And me, vulnerable at the beginning of the end of so many things and beings I know I will soon have to love in absentia. 

At the beginning, I didn’t have nephews that could die, my brother didn’t have cancer, and my dog—this incredible being who steadfastly gate-keeps the final frontier of my loneliness—I had yet to love and face losing. The same sickness whittling away at my brother now comes with a freshly sharpened blade for my boy. My constant companion. In the beginning was blissful unawareness of cruel irony. 

All of this feels so far from the edge of 17. So far from the beginning of everything. Too much closer to the beginning of endings I’m not ever going to be ready for. I didn’t know at the beginning that life might someday stack your heartbreak one on top of the other, and leave it for you to sort through like some fucked up card catalog of letting go. 

Now I know. 
~
My sister is good at holding hope. She has arms like a welcome web and a heart like a dandelion. No matter how many times darkness comes to mow it down, it comes back the next morning ready to bloom and silver. Ready to be blown into the wind of whatever comes next, believing something good will come. 

I admire it. I admire her. I have a rusty sort of tenacity in me. It’s not organic. It’s after market. It’s clunks hard and stubbornly into gear and idles too low. It has to be installed and re-installed when things break down and it doesn’t come over night. It has to be tinkered with. McGuyver'ed into existence. My sister helps.

These days, I don’t feel like I know much of anything. It’s all free fall. But there is one thing I do know: 

If love were to sneak up on my sky, if it were to show up unexpected and heavy with the cumulus of beginnings, I would stand willingly and gratefully beneath it. 

I would open the hungry mouth of my skin and drink it like the saguaros drink and hold rain. I would let it rise off the heat of my body and shimmer like I was made of two-lane blacktop, living only for the warmth of the sun.  

Love, man. 
Even as it tears me apart, I want more of it.