The Sails of Romance

When you think you’ll never love again…

I’m like all men of midnight, with shadows hidden. Daylight, fearful as it is, shows me not to be a freak, but in some way friendly.

The merry-go-round goes on turning, and every friendly face seems just the same when disappearing in the rain. I started out not knowing who I am. When was it, never mind. I dwell too much on sadness. Still, we don’t know one the other, and that’s as good a way to end as start. There is nothing we can do or say beyond hello.

I have little permanency. I ought to stay home behind the iron gates and rainbow glass with not much time left up ahead. Safe in places I’ve constructed, physically or in my mind, quiet, and best of all, where the disappointments of the past and those yet to come can be lived in private. No one need ever know if the wounds are fatal or if I’m waiting out healing time.

There is an emptiness, and it is deep, so old that healing won’t work. I have somehow come back to where I started — only inches or a lifetime — from the narrow corridor that brings a reckoning.

We cannot cheat death; it’s a thing of the night. It will be a relief, I’ll not deny it. Regrets? Here and there, maybe. I never learned wisdom, and now that world is fast slipping away.

I’ve been loved, times when romance felt like sailing into a perfect tropical night — reaching forward with every sail set, jib, staysail, foresail, mainsail, and both jackyard topsails, when everything was looking and feeling so unutterably beautiful, and the sun sets with the burning glow of a double scotch.

What, then, can fill such an empty space? The bravery of new love? Maybe. But old nights must first couple with new days, till eventually, one fades from the other. When life must be lived again inside a ballroom, a rock band playing, and maybe a girl walks in, unknown, and the room begins to shimmer. I’m just another man, waiting. She whispers, come with me, I’m heading for the beach.

Space is again filled, sails set…