A Song for Your Birthday

-just for reference, this you is not the you I usually write to/about.  This you is a something of a ghost, and I cannot call him fiction, more's the pity.  If ever there was a confirmation that I am worthy of the title "fool," though, he is it.  

Dates sneak up on a person sometimes if they're not paying attention.  I was just putting stuff up on Tumblr, and a post about Faulkner's birthday rolled through.  That set something, a dim memory of an unfortunate conjunction of dates, spinning like fall leaves in my mind, and I looked at the calendar.  Sure enough, the numbers don't lie.  Tomorrow would have once been significant to me, would once have had me getting ready to tell you happy birthday, wondering whether or not I was currently "in favor" enough with you among all your collection of girls to get to do something with you on the actual day.  I might have even been trying to figure out what to get you depending on what phase of that long, dark night we were in together.

A friend of mine is a quite a fan of Dylan, and he and I have a running conversation about his music since I famously haven't been.  He sent me several songs to listen to since lately it seems I might be on the verge of conversion.   In the playlist, there was one that immediately made me think of you, "What Was It You Wanted."  It rather perfectly sums up the confusion I always felt every time we went somewhere and you hugged me too close too long, were just a little too affectionate; every time one of my new roommates ever told me, "Oh...but...I thought....," after having to have the stupidity of the situation of you and me explained; every time you gave me silly little gifts or roses and then turned around and hit on one (or more) of my friends; every time you somehow kept me together when the world shattered, pushed me to reach for things I didn't know I could do, and then casually kicked me down a flight of stairs afterward by ignoring me, being in a bad mood, or by switching to one of the girls you collected, who, like me, were damn fools enough to put up with you.

Yeah.  God, I wish I'd had it back then.  It would have made a perfect present for you.  I could have just sent it as a response to an email, or low tech as we all were "back in the day," left it burned on a CD hanging on the door of the Wesley for you to pick up on the way through.  I could have left it, let Dylan say everything that needed to be said, and walked away from you.  It's what should have happened so long ago.  In a perfect universe, those "do-over" sorts of universe possible only in the movies and in worlds populated by blue police boxes, I suppose it still could.  I like to think of it.  It makes me proud to think that in some alternate world, that tall, long-haired girl flipped you the bird musically (the most appropriate of all possible ways for you after all since so much of our time together seemed to revolve around music, the playing of it, the listening to it, the participating in it, the talking about it) and walked away.

You are long gone now, and you've finally stopped sending me Christmas cards.  Whatever I felt for you ended a long time ago, too, except for the lack of understanding of what it was all about, about why you were the way you were, what it was that you wanted from me, about why I was so foolish as to keep on in a situation that was as full of stupidity and pain as that one was.  And all that, I guess, is never going to be made clear to me.   I'm just going to take this last birthday, then, to give you one last belated present.  Burn it to a CD if  needed to get the right feel and sort of consider it a statement asked many, many years too late.