TOO LATE TO STOP NOW
When I write I like to listen to the same song over and over again, although need to listen feels a more accurate phrase. This repeated listening returns me to a place where I can see the next thing I want to say, although of course I don’t mean see with my eyes, just like I don’t mean returns me to a place exactly, e although I wish I did.
Let me try this again. When I sat down to write about one of those songs, it returned me to the place where I first heard it, the place it came from and even the place where I’m listening to it now. These places have nothing in common except inside of me, which is the place a story begins, as well as where it ends:
I’m on my way to meet Van Morrison for coffee.
I text my husband from the backseat of Frankee’s shiny red BMW. Frankee teaches mindfulness at Queens University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where I have been living for several months on a 2020 Fulbright Fellowship at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry. Frankee wears square black glasses, pedals around the compact center of Belfast on an E-bike and is great company, if prone to spontaneous Zen-ish interrogation.
“And what do you have to offer the North of Ireland?” he asked five minutes into our first meeting. I’d just shoved a handful of onion crisps in my mouth.
“My attention?” I replied, my mouth still full. He nodded, but not in a way that indicated whether this was or wasn’t an acceptable response.
“And did you know your own face before you were born?” I don’t recall what I said to that one, but eventually I also learned that Frankee was lifelong pals with Van the Man.
Yes, that Van Morrison, I reply to my husband’s surprise face emoji.
It has been nearly a quarter century since an otherwise unremarkable college boyfriend from Boston ghosted me cold while also gifting me immeasurably by leaving his copy of behind in my boom box. My apartment that summer perched above an equally unremarkable midwestern Chinese take-out place. Each morning as I worked on me—or so it felt—like a spell. One that suggested I was going to change my life.
