He tried to write songs to which everyone could relate, songs that had a better than average chance of making someone smile and remember something long forgotten. Only rarely did he succeed as he hoped. Once in a while his piano would reach out like the ghost of some long lost déjà vu and confront you with your own long ago. He tried to steal lyrics from conversations we’ve all had before and then give them back before we even missed them. It was sleepy like dreams, his music, and you might convince yourself that you didn’t like it just before a tear ran down your cheek and surprised you, having escaped into the present from some broken heart that mended years before. He’ll never be famous, and you may never remember him, but your memories will. Yesterday is a fan of his.
At first you thought it might have been your imagination, but now you are sure. Someone is approaching quietly through the mist and fog of this marshy fen. You aren’t afraid, for some reason, though you have a kind of existential anxiety about this stranger’s impending arrival. You feel compelled to refrain from calling out, and you are too exhausted to rise from the wet, cold ground and try some sort of escape. He’s walking directly toward you, deliberate and ominous. Your panting heaves have slowed a bit but your pulse still pounds loudly in your head, the rhythm of your mortality asserting itself against inevitable doom. And still he comes. He was always going to come.
It’s a cold July day in the South American city, and you are hurrying back to the rustic hostel with your lunch, so you do not notice that the tiny monkey in the tree overhead is wearing a little hat. He’s waiting there for the old man to play that song on the guitar. Then he’ll do his dance. He’s pretty good at it, the monkey, though he hasn’t done it for a few months. The old man got sick and stopped coming to the corner with his tin cup and guitar. The monkey sits and waits, feeling a kind of primitive nostalgia for the dance, the guitar, the old man. Somewhere, not far away, there is the sound of a funeral procession.
Hello, friends. I hope you’re well.
Later. Love.
