Boots of Spanish Leather

[an excerpt from the current writing project]:

2012

But I dream of her. I dream of her all the time. 

It's weird. The dreams are usually about the stuff we used to do together. Like when we drove her Jeep Up North for Fall Break that autumn of my senior year. We bought our lunch from our favorite deli in downtown Petoskey and brought it to the beach where we had a picnic on the shores of Lake Michigan. I sat there silently watching the waves, hoping she wouldn't bring up my hangover. I watched the lake and the line of the beach and noticed that the tide had changed and the sea gulls were working busily well down the slope of new wet sand. The red and white buoys out in the distance were diminishing as they receded. You could smell the lake in the October winds, and the white caps crashing against the pier foretold of winter. 

In another dream, we are camping out in the woods at her cabin on Sugar Island. Right before I wake up, she turns the ignition on her family's speedboat. I'm on shore, and she's kind of waving good bye. I'm standing on a beach of washed up pine needles and she's going off into the Lake Superior sunset, into another life. I've had that dream so many times I've lost count. 

Sometimes I wake from those dreams convinced it is the Fall of 2009 all over again, but it's never real. The ticking of the clock reminds me that she is gone and those days of my Indian summer were a long time ago. I lay awake in bed, wishing I had asked her to send boots of spanish leather. I got rid of her letters a long time ago, but you can't get rid of dreams. 

Twenty-Seven

Their ghosts have been hounding me since the stroke of midnight. They know my weaknesses all too well. Some days your flush and some days your bust.

Moon

"Favorite food? Blues (speed). Miscellaneous likes? Birds. Professional ambition? To smash one hundred drum kits. Personal ambition? To stay young forever. There you have it, the world of Keith Moon effectively encapsulated in a few choice words. Straightforward hedonistic pleasures, cheerfully destructive tendencies, and an unattainable goal, except in the words that Townshend had just written and which Moon alone would live up to/down to: 'Hope I die before I get old.'"

Tony Fletcher, Moon: The Life and Death of a Rock Legend

Snapshots of My Life

It was March, two years ago. The proverbial rock bottom. It's the only secret that I still cling to from those days, my very last drinking days. I knew, then, with the horrifying clarity of a funeral for a loved one, that I was done, that I could never touch the stuff again, that I had once and for all crossed that forbidden line. March brings with it the memories of those events, those charred visions of me at my worst. They're scary. But this song popped on at work today, and I understood that it had to be this way forever -- that I always have to remember those days.

"I wrecked the El Camino

Would have been DWI

So I just walked off and left it

Laying on it's side.

The troopers found it in the morning

They said it's purely luck I wasn't killed

I probably ought to quit my drinking

But I don't believe I will."

James McMurtry, "Rachel's Song"