last layer leaving

 
Everything she told me, every game we played, always ended with “I won’t stay” and I might lie and say I was ok with it, but her youth, her shining youth, and her open mind, sometimes so far open it skipped genius and became a beautiful stupidity, were lights in the sky of my own mind, and our fucking was honest for it, so I chose not to hear.  
 
And then she left, like she said she would, and I stood still and took it. Forced me to find philosophy in what remained, or old songs like rejection would have had me back at the bottle, so it was philosophy I found, an acceptance of her youth and my grey hair, an understanding that some things have to end to allow some kind of final beauty, as if endings are like the last layer of varnish on a good piece of wood.  
 
So I turned my mind from her and on to other ideas, to my own works, and then, for the first time in months, I began to write. It was not good writing, but it was at least words made solid, and in that solidity of written words I felt more solid too, began to see a new path for my words, a path I had always known, but it was she who had made the path real in listening to my plan. She came to me because I am a man, a strong tender good man, full of all the colors that make life, with a rod of steel up my back that I grew there myself. It did not start out so straight, and it did not always serve me well, until I learned that the strength of steel is in its ability to bend without failing. I came to her with that kind of steel, and a good woman, seeking a real man to meet truly in mind and body will see it, will feel it, will open to it.  
 
We were a forge then, alchemy really, adding chemistry to immutable things, and love came from it, came from open regard, came from caring, came from being loved, from giving without weakness, from sense of solid self laid open all the way to the dark places.  
 
I think I trained all my life for that woman, to meet her then, and meet her that way. It made sense of things, of the times I had failed, of the darknesses I created when I was too weak to learn, to weak to stop drawing blood, to weak to love. That is what I’ll write then; Hope. Journey. Healing. Fire. Endings and beginnings….the same damned thing.  
 
So now she is gone, and philosophy has come, and I read and smoke outside in the sun, but always write in the shade. Perhaps loving her was like that too, perhaps meeting her equally and honestly was a time in the sun, where I grew and learned, taking her as gospel. Today I am writing. Outside is the sun. She is gone. Somehow these things are all the same, and here I am, not dead, not dying. Good enough. Bye baby.