Love Story Under A Full Worm Moon

I had a dream I was going to go visit my Neptunian Ex to show him all the music I wrote for him this fall.

There have been about 3 songs swirling around and their riffs and hooks coiling in certain memories that I’ve had since we met a lifetime ago. In that period, I could hardly make sense of myself, so I simply drew them in a sketchbook, showed him, looked at his bewildered face and then vowed I’d eventually learn how to make them with glee.

After we broke up, they haunted me, these scrubby hieroglyphs of sound.

Last year, I tried to put them into digital forms but they came out differently than I anticipated. Like starting an act in one set of clothes and changing midway, they became different, poppier, horns undercutting the drums. Convinced they might not exist anymore, I put them in a folder and slid them into the internet.

This spring though they returned as the ivy creeping across fences, and I heard them when the wind rolled over the daffodils in the park. Little notes in bamboo, tinkling sugar cherries tugging at my old self. In vain, I tried for weeks to buy a keyboard, then borrow one, but working them out physically evaded me.

But back to this dream.

I had been traveling for days to find him, dressed in a yellow raincoat to my ankles and party dress. It was night, like it was always night in all my memories of Neptunian Ex. His face is highlighted through a cloud of smoke, cigarettes or something else, gasoline green light, lit up by red jukeboxes and flashlights and grey moonlight. His skin was always such a lovely tawny unspotted canvas, but mostly I saw it reflecting all pushy unnatural places in alcoholic gauze.

Getting there was complicated, endless apartments and porches with a cold glow, yellow walls, halogen smeared streets with people smoking outside to walk through until we finally got to a huge wooden slat bungalow in Manitowoc. Inside the floors were wet with black water, and I walked on a plank from the front door to an inner chamber slathered in fake Persian rugs. The water wasn’t water though when I looked back, instead it was his glittering, shallow personal Styx, and in there I saw my face, long, translucent and laughing and a whole bunch of other people I met and had forgotten and danced with.

There were lamps on every surface, in various shades of candlelight, blankets on the couches and a faint dog smell. Not too many plants, not all matching dishes.

I was a vaudevillian, a salesman, a pilgrim who had come home. World weary and worn, my hair like blonde straw and under this worm moon I felt like my skin was edged in a pale green, like a new leaf. Grass stains on my knees and I still believed that I could charm him, ask him to come out to the forest, even though his house was so tangled with a new life and I knew it was a thin stringy chance I had.

They were having dinner, but also walking around or cleaning or watching shows or brushing pets. Was I intruding? My presence was a chord that cannot be unstruck and a shimmer went up through the walls as I realized the depth of my resonance here. I was indeed out of place in what could have been my castle.

I saw photos that were all his new memories, treasures cheap but richly remembered and fantasies in puddles in his room. There was a woman there, wary of me and my green hue, my jingling change from around the world, my parted lips breathless dewy, shiny spew of stories real, remembered and superimposed.

Okay, what’s the story morning glory, he said in just the way his voice should be, but he stayed Parked in a chair, placed like a pillow there, safe, but kind, but soft, but pliant Pisces. Like he had once wanted to be kneaded, worked over by me, but now he was staying put. I had always had this feeling though, like my ambitions met no edges with him, just rattled a few things inside.

I had come to offer something, something so important I believed, but a party had started, and he didn’t want my gifts, there were others, and my rosy face and fancy clothes didn’t match the neighborhood. While he flitted about entertaining everyone else, his face was a mixture of pity and a pale shade of regret every time our faces aligned: I had come back too late. It wasn’t the right time anymore. Instead of a welcome, I got forgiven, for everything, and probably things I don’t even understand which infuriated me because I wanted to reciprocate.

But wait, I started to cry, I still have songs for you, and he briefly paused, just for a second in between children and snacks and music and mustaches, I will sing for you, I will write for you I will help you! Listen to this! I pulled out feathers and papers and pencils and stamps.

Sadly, he began to walk away.

The song stayed Stuck and when I finally pulled it out, it was just old flower petals in my backpack, fluttering to the floor.

Miserable, I walked out across the Styx again to lay on the lawn and look at the stars.

I’m sorry, I said to the trees.
We know, his voice said.

I felt the last of that stringy golden thread slip into the ground, the worm moon, decomposing me into a new sound.