Should I make the effort, crawl on hands and knees, to pluck the giver of wishes from his comfortable home between production and sports? He's been there for months. If I was going to snatch it up, I would have done it already.
Or, perhaps, I'm scared I may get all I ever dreamed of.
I haven't opened the odd-shaped case in the corner of my room for weeks for the same reason. If opened, I might actually learn to play the guitar, sing the blues, win you back and live happily ever after.
It could happen, I'm just terrified of the alternative.
If I open that guitar case, I open my heart. I don't know if I could stand to have my heart broken by you. I already did enough breaking for the both of us.
Which is why, for today, I will not tell you how I feel.
On the other hand, today I had an interesting revelation. In a class about the history of photography and images, my professor projected a long list of words and sentences on the wall. A poem titled "An Old Man" by Constantine Cavafy kept me captive. I couldn't move, all I could do was sit quietly and wipe the wet from my cheeks.
At the noisy end of the cafe,
Head bent over the table, an old man sits alone
A newspaper in front of him
And in the miserable banality of old age
He thinks how little he enjoyed the years
When he had strength and eloquence and beauty
He knows he's very old now; sees it, feels it
Yet it seems he was young just yesterday
How short, how short a time
And he thinks how Discretion fooled him,
How he always believed, so stupidly
That cheat who said "Tomorrow, you have plenty of time"
He remembers impulses bridled, the joy
He sacrificed. Every chance he lost
Now mocks his brainless prudence.
But so much thinking, so much remembering makes the old man dizzy.
He falls asleep,
His head resting on the cafe table.
Head bent over the table, an old man sits alone
A newspaper in front of him
And in the miserable banality of old age
He thinks how little he enjoyed the years
When he had strength and eloquence and beauty
He knows he's very old now; sees it, feels it
Yet it seems he was young just yesterday
How short, how short a time
And he thinks how Discretion fooled him,
How he always believed, so stupidly
That cheat who said "Tomorrow, you have plenty of time"
He remembers impulses bridled, the joy
He sacrificed. Every chance he lost
Now mocks his brainless prudence.
But so much thinking, so much remembering makes the old man dizzy.
He falls asleep,
His head resting on the cafe table.
This could be me 50 years from now. Twenty-two is probably too young to contemplate dying alone, but the thought still crosses my mind from time to time.
The penny on the ground stares up at me. All I need to do is pick it up. The patient guitar waits for me to come home. All I need to do is play it. The silent phone waits to be dialed. All I have to do is call him.
