Homecoming

Have you ever woken up, skin on skin in the afternoon, not from pain or a nightmare but slowly, gently, trusting the moment? The woman next to you is who put you to sleep, and you put her to sleep, and she’s wound around you and into you so ideally that everything is comfort and nobody is pulled out of shape, bruised or strained.

The comforter, doing its eponymous best, is feather-soft and just warm enough; nobody sweats. When she rustles very slightly you just lie there, undisturbed and undisturbing, enjoying the wonderfully weird slag glass fixture overhead and the paint you laid onto these walls together, years before. For as long as you can, before the shoulder plate checks in or your legs spike and jab or your bladder wakes up you just lie there and listen to her, the unearned core of your happiness, breathe and softly call out and maybe snore just a little, and all you know is that her skin is perfect and you are suffused in the analgesia of a moment that will not last but also is forever, because she gave it to you and the gift was perfect.

Music in your head resolves into notes and lyrics and chords, the Eagles crooning “Johnny Come Lately” or Steve Miller explaining that he ain’t superstitious and he don’t get suspicious and you know right then that indeed your woman is a friend of yours, get up very quietly, and pad softly out of the room to make some tea, saving the last dab of heavy cream for when she wakes up.



It’s good to come home to a place where the neighbors trust your intentions, where you know the strange little house in a way that you only can when you’ve had your hands in its bones and sinews, working through its troubles using a body that you know as you can only when other people have had their hands in your bones and sinews and still you got this chance to live again and pour your still-twitching tissues into this moment of peace, belonging to this neighborhood and to this region and to this country in a way that flapping a dirty flag off the back of a shiny truck with rubber nuts can never imbue.

I used to say “I’d love God more if she showed me her tits.” It was my sig quote for years. Today I learned, not at all for the first time, that my tiny piece of the godhead is everything I need, and so much sweeter than I deserve.

Gratitude without humiliation. A prayer without supplication.

I hope that you’ve had a moment exactly like that, only entirely different because it, and the memory of it, belong to you alone; and I hope that you’re able to explain it better than I can, if only to yourself because that is and will remain yours forever, rippling through the cosmos, gently improving everything that is.