Suffering and Hope

Paean to two sirens of my youth

The sound of your voices is a café and a used bookstore, drifting through the streets of Hillcrest, North Park, University Heights, Normal Heights, Kensington.  It is the sun on my face and my feet on the sidewalk as I make my pilgrimage daily, stopping at every altar to drink, eat, read, wonder what my life will be in that sacrosanct time yet to come. 

At each holy shrine, I find a table, set a pile of books before me, pull out a notebook and pen, prepare for the rite. 

At each altar, I hear you, sometimes through speakers, sometimes resonating in my memory.

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Lilting, effervescent, eternally youthful, that smile wise beyond your years, that lovely brogue that would melodically melt stone into pure passion. 

Eyes downcast as listeners sit rapt in attention, grasping desperately at every fragile syllable you whisper as though each one held an infinite bounty.

I thought then, in the tunnel vision that afflicts those fresh in this world, that I would hear the both of you forever, not just as I sat in the laundromat on Park Street and thumbed through Hegel, but also when I was old, in that time that then, as always, could not even really be imagined.

I hoped you would never grow old. 

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Dolores, sufferings. Like all of us, you knew pain and abuse and sorrow and depression. Like many fewer, you also knew joy and success and tremendous wealth and the standing of royalty in the country of your birth. 

You were gone before you could grow old, carried away in the waters of your bath that January night in London. 

You had called your mother in the wee hours, and you were found submerged and cold in the tub later that morning, four times the legal limit of alcohol in your system. The terrible inevitability with which something many of us do and almost all survive nonetheless stills the hearts of a few.

You go to join that choir of joyous voices that brought so much delirious happiness to so many and that were yet haunted by their own sorrows to an early departure from this realm.

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I went to an open mic poetry night at one of those cafés where they played your music. 

The readings were as one expects under such conditions.  I started to leave, but I stopped under the force of your sincerity. I sat there and listened to these bad poets and I tried to imagine the fearful and wonderful things that had happened to them and that served as the impetus for the words they used so imperfectly to try to communicate their hurt and their joy and their vulnerability and their overcoming and their gratitude.

I forgave them their inability to bring the thing they were trying to express to life and embraced their honest, naked desire to speak to all of us in the room gathered there, each nursing his own failures and incompleteness.

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In a dream, Dolores, I leave the café poetry reading and somehow appear in your hotel room, just as you’re slipping beneath the water’s surface, and I pull you from the water, and you gasp for air for a minute, and you cough a few times, and then you are fine. 

And there also with us in the dream—how could it be otherwise with such an ending?—is Hope. 

I give you a towel to cover and dry. We don’t say a word, the three of us.  I don’t even think of telling you how much your voices haunt me because I suspect in dreams you would know such things.  

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Then, still in the dream, we fall, the three of us.

It is a soundless, blind falling, and even though we know it cannot end well, we are very happy. We enjoy the breeze that streaks the tears across our faces.

Still falling, as that is our condition, which you knew even in the bloom of youth.

But what joy to know that you, Dolores, for a moment, are no longer breathless, and you accompany us.

And Hope, eyes dark and hair electric, is whispering something that I cannot hear but that I nonetheless know to be right.