The trouble with being a romantic is that ugly inclination to wear one's heart on their sleeve - the material of which is already a garish madras pattern.
The trouble with being a romantic in the summertime, that great dream season, the season of my youth and of my electric transformations, is everything - everything - is filled with terrible portent. The smallest details; unreturned text messages, unintended discoveries, a train whistle, a dead crow, they're swept up in the still wet air of a muggy June, July, August night. I am an unabashed armchair symbologist - less Robert Langdon than installation artist - and I see the future in my personal tea leaves.
It's a charming malady, really, an extension of a minor Peter Pan complex, and of the spirituality long suppressed by my rational, agnostic, stomped-grass mind. It's the way I stay hopeful, and maybe even filled with a bursting love. But it comes at a price: namely, it makes me crazy.
One day I will set about to chronicle in lyrical fashion the journey my late-night runs have really taken me on. Several nights ago, running the Duval Road path that I call the Holy Road - 4 churches and one Buddhist temple line a suburban strip less than 2 and a half miles long - I came across a black crow, dead as any black crow has ever been, laying on a discarded mattress in front of a darkened town home. The ants and the flies had yet to feast.
I stopped mid-stride, puffing out a bit, and bent to examine the bird. He was thick and glossy, strangely robust, as if he'd only just begun to sleep. Here is where my fantastical symbologist's brain overclocks and spits out a cloudy stream of nonsense, absolutely credible nonsense.
I am the bird. Or, maybe I am not the bird. The bird is death. He is...rest. He is the rest I deserve, or command, after two years of difficulty. It would be too easy to say a black crow is an enemy - he is my friend. Is the crow warning me? Advising me of my own mortality, pressing me to ease up, to stop overanalyzing every text and every train whistle? I don't know what it says about me that a perfectly undisturbed black crow laying square on a dingy twin mattress is romantic. It is. I don't know that it says anything at all.
It has come to my attention, almost a year on since I opened JK Loves You, that, while ostensibly about love and lust in a single boy's life, these writings are really about relationships of any stripe - they are about a loner's relentless obsession with making a connection, and his simultaneous rejection of any connection. Eventually, you hope to meet in the middle; some call that happiness, others peace.
I'll be sorting the tea leaves all summer, and it's gonna be a hot one.
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