early

I’ve been reading love letters lately. Not my own. No one you’d know. Not that it matters. All I’m concerned with lately is the atmosphere in which other people love. How they find it. Where they keep it. How it falls apart. The reaction to all those pieces lying on the floor. Maybe its because I’m writing all these shorts stories on the way people love and all the horrible things we do to one another. It never really seems to work out, does it? I remember being on the side of the road outside Nebraska and the boy that I loved back then was changing a flat tire on my truck. He was driving  me to California to leave me there, to say goodbye, and to eventually fall in love with someone else. I couldn’t blame anyone. I was the one who left. We are all so happy now in cozy houses and making records. He’s getting married this summer and I wrote Red Book about the day I found out. I had gone straight to my bedroom and read journal entries in an old red leather bound journal I kept during our time together. One of the best moments detailed that afternoon, that flat tire, the unmistakable way I loved him back then. It was this incredible piece of time that could only exist because we hardly yet existed. I was standing on the edge of my life, he held my hand. So now I watch everyone and I read your letters and I listen to your stories. I try and piece it apart just to rake it all back together. Redraw the lines, change the names, rewrite the moments.