But this is dangerous thinking, a therapist friend told me. She also said "you can give too much of yourself away."
As this year, and this decade, crawl away into history's morbid shadows, I'm filled with gratitude, as always, for all I have, and deep sadness for what has been taken from me. A friend points to a picture -- that should be you, the friend says, but it quite clearly isn't you.
The reason your friend had to bring this to your attention is that you've been too depressed to look for yourself. You didn't want to know.
But we live in an era where there are no secrets -- everybody shares everything -- so of course this perfidious evidence exists, and has existed since the very moment, three days after the photo above was snapped, for you or anyone to see, had you wanted to.
You still don't want to, you turn your head away, but your friend is insistent. You turn instead to look at her face, reflecting her deep concern for your welfare.
"You haven't been out for weeks," she says. Her lovely eyes and long hair, black as Michigan dirt, complement her round face, her prominent lips, her red cheeks. Not to mention her tiny, 5'2" frame, clothed this time in jeans and a tight-fitting, low-cut T-shirt and red tennis shoes.
She is a baby compared to you, with many decades ahead to learn the lessons you are reeling under, should she survive that long. She's a smoker, of both types of the smokes available around here, so you often remind her that her time might prove to be much more limited than it could have been otherwise.
She just smiles, shrugs, and pokes you in the ribs: "So I can grow old and be lonely like you, Mister Giveaway Man?"
She gave you this nickname because (like that therapist) she thinks you are always giving yourself away to people -- to the point that pretty soon there won't be anything left to give...but what does she know?
"C'mon," she says, grabbing you by the hand. "Let's go back to the studio."
Inside the cramped, cold space under a freeway, the band is cutting its latest CD. You've both been hanging out here off and on for days. Those that drink have been drinking; those that smoke have been doing that. The sweet smell of 420 hangs over the place, and you squint to see the lead singer as he twirls your lyrics into their latest sequence: "I'm okay, every day, I'm just fine, most all the time, but then comes night, and all of a sudden I'm just not right..."
So few people know of your second career or your third; you've kept too many secrets all of these years. It's ironic, isn't it, that this willowy little girl knows more about you as a songwriter than your closest friends or family members?
As the drummer steps up the beat, she begins to dance, twirling around and gyrating, her smile getting bigger and her body enticing you to join her.
Okay, here you go. You've always been a good dancer -- that's what the ladies say -- but if it's true it's only because you feel the music as it passes through you like electricity. In an instant, you're back in Chicago, then Nashville, then Miami, then L.A.
So many songs, so many singers, and the royalties, all filed under a pseudonym, adding up bit by bit into a tiny fortune that you'll be able to leave to -- who, exactly?
***
You've always accepted change, including in your personal affairs. "People fall out of love," one of those you loved the most once told you.
Thinking back to the photo your little dancing friend has forced you to view, you suddenly realize that that is what must have happened here, right?
Otherwise, why so quickly after leaving your embrace was she so obviously and publicly in this new man's arms? Who is he anyway? Why does his face have such a nasty expression?
"Hey, Mister Giveaway Man, where you goin'? Your little friend is stoned and twirling farther and farther away from your perch on a barstool, here where there is no bar.
You think back to a place much like this long ago. The smoke choked the room then like it does now. The music? The blues, in the Village, a long time back.
Only one other person knows about this story. She went there with you, to listen to a legend. Afterwards, you handed him a slip of paper with some words scribbled on it.
The royalties from that one have never amounted to much but you still like their ring:
Now I see you,
Now I don't.
Now I love you,
Now I won't.
Take it with you,
When you go.
Day will come,
You'll miss me so...
On and on. Songs of love, love lost, betrayal, the pain of having your heart cut in two. There's a song, one you did not write, that claims that the "first cut is the deepest."
But that's only a song. The worst cut, much much worst, is the last one, the one that leaves you to bleed to death just outside of the light where the music is playing, your friend is dancing, the smoke is rising, the beat is building, life is being lived, all except for yours.
-30-
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