I have no great love for thanksgiving and the reason is I lost something around that date several years ago. I’ve mentioned that a girl named Julie haunts this blog and the reason is because it always hurts to have somebody you love leave you but there is another reason as well.
Julie took the week off work and took the week off me to have an abortion. She had the abortion on the Saturday before Thanksgiving and her sister took her. I paid but she didn’t want me around. Julie then recovered for two days and left for a break to Las Vegas. Although I was old enough to know better I had assumed everything would remain how it was.
Comeplete silence for days.
Then on Tthanksgiving I was at work for a couple of hours before going to my sisters home in Long Island. I was listening to Ryan Adam’s album Rock N Roll. Julie called. “I have a hangover” she said laughing loudly. “I was so drunk last night.”
“Having fun? ” I asked. I knew something was gonna happen, something I needed to hear and tell but my words were coming out in the half shell of cliche where strong words, what I needed to say, weren’t coming out.
“You are the only person I’ve called. You and Mom.”
“But like physically…?
“Oh yeah, yeah. I’m walking in the sun and I can feel it on my back. I went dancing last night… there was this guy…” I could hear her shrug over the phone. “I dunno. It got a little worse than I hoped it would. I got… I feel bad but. you know, whatever.”
“Wish You Were Here” by Ryan Adams is playing now . An acoustic based riff fueling yet another lost song and Adams voice is all tenderness and loss and hurt. I remember being conscious of the paradigm of music even as I knew it was an important conversation and one which could cost me dearly if I got it wrong. But my attention kept going back to the song. “Everybody knows the way I walk and the way I talk and the way I feel about you” and I wanted to steal the line and give it to Julie. “It’s totally fucked, I’m totally fucked”. I did repeat those words. Julie would never know the difference.
I could see her in fron tof me in flip slops and shorts and a tee reading “Welcome To Las Vegas” and shades covering her half her face, black straight hair tumbling down her back. “We always knew it wouldn’t last…” she said.
Sure we did, it was the rules we set up at the begining. It’s what you get when you date yong girls. I set it up, she set it down. One day walking in Bryant Park Julie had said “We don’t have to marry each other to have kids, in this day and age it doesn’t even matter.”
“Except your parents would disown you and I would never forgive myself. It’s not what I want for you. I want you to marry somebody your own age and have the happiest life you can. All those things I can never give you -I love you too much not to just accept I am going to end up heartbroken”.
And of course, she married somebody her own age and my wounds won’t heal.
And on that Thanksgiving all I can hear is the end approach. Julie’s tone was all finality. I could hear it in her voive and though I couldn’t see her face I knew what her expression was, the frown, the furrow, the concentration. “I don’t want to fight.” i said.
She laughed aloud. “Fight? It’s too late for fights. It’s too late for everything. I should have… I don’t blame you…”
“But you do, of course.”
“No, no… I guess I loved you once” but her voice is deadpan, it’s like she was saying it but she couldn’t remember it. And Ryan Adam’s is singing “It’s totally fucked up, totally fucked up”.
So whose ghost haunts this blog? Mine? The babies? Julies? Ryan Adams?
I’m totally fucked up. It’s all a bunch of shit.
Have a nice Thanksgiving.
Wish you were here.
Lyric To “Wish You Were Here” by Ryan Adams:
Cotton candy and a rotten mouth
You know you’re so fucked up
You know I couldn’t help but have it for you
And everybody knows the way I walk
And knows the way I talk
And knows the way I feel about you
It’s all a bunch of shit
And there’s nothing to do around here
It’s totally fucked up
I’m totally fucked up
Wish you were here
And streets that only turn to boulevards
And houses with back yards
and it’s raining like hell on the cars
And everybody knows the way I walk
And knows the way I talk
Knows the way I feel about you
It’s all a bunch of shit
And there’s nothing to do around here
It’s totally fucked
I’m totally fucked
Wish you were here
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