Habits with Force

This miniscule tangent leaps of moments, mimicking predecessor days, are really all I’m constructed of anymore.  There is comfort, really, almost seemingly life’s goal, achievement, to make these wanders of every day, or rather every corresponding Saturday-to-Saturday and Tuesday-to-Tuesday in that work sevenths are distinct in map, timing and flow from weekend potentials.

I like that I park in the same spot in my work garage daily, not that I merit something reserved, but because I park two levels above what my portion of rush-hour-arrivers begin to fill, arriving myself at a near-empty 10th floor.  I awake, I brush my teeth, read prior days’ newspapers or prior months’ Rolling Stone during my constitution, or the Nashville Scene free magazine that I routinely pick up at Krogers, using its utility as a table across the grate of the shopping cart’s child seat as a place to organize my coupons (I typically save 10% on my shopping, enough to cover the sales tax).  I empty the litter boxes of the now-nine cats that we’ve inherited as strays brought home by my daughters dating back to my now eldest Frosty’s 6-week old discovery some 16 years ago (and he was probably the 6th cat over my 33-1/3 year marriage, others having further back passed away, the eldest at 19).  I give Frosty his morning thyroid and blood pressure medicine, and then split a cat of canned cat food amongst them all (dry cat food stays out all day long).  I get a bit stoned, waking-and-baking (when I have such product in stock), even on workdays…perhaps nowadays especially then, take my shower and dress, and drive the same 40-mile one-way trip to my employer, and later in the p.m. back home again.

Not just with the drive, but certainly that example’s things well, but my life is essentially on auto-pilot, with an adeption for short-term deviations (like caring for my dad after his pacemaker surgery, like taking Monday off to cart my 76-year-old mother to her oncologist for results of weeks of bad blood tests, to receive the happy news that she does not have the feared bone cancer, though she’s to have labs quarterly for 2 years to confirm the non-diagnosis).

And I guess this routine, this rote path is acceptable.

Really the point of this, though, is to say that I have ingrained at some subconscious level other habits I cannot quit, things I really didn’t comprehend were occurring.

One of my favorite songs by Mark Knopfler is from his “Sailing to Philadelphia” CD, “Prairie Wedding”.  It speaks of a lonely man who finds a bride through correspondence, who he’s never met prior to her arrival by train to become his wife, but who so earnestly and obviously fell in love with his sad sack self from the honest emotions within those shared letters, fell in love from the tangle of words alone.  This is how love at first sight surely is conjured, by a preface of minds dancing before light is reflected between one and another.

Though the moment passed, shockingly nearing 15 years ago, love that I unearthed within this place still brings me happiness, even at an uncommunicative but harmlessly accepted overlapping distance of mutual nonchalance.

I realized that, as was true in the first flood of moments, there is no greater gift I receive in life than periodic pictures of her, always thrilled for her advances in life, and beaming stupidly proud at her creation of life.  I think, besides the intimacy of sketching her for the sake of my wanting familiarize myself with her incremental everything, the value of photos was not unlike computer programs built to measure and gauge multiple photos of varying angles of historic figures to build a 3-D model, that habitual digestion of her visually has tattooed the section of my brain that in prehistoric times was constant background surveying the landscape and approaching crevices for carnivores, or even the hint of their lurk.   For years, years, though waning to passing random weeks or months before I’ve realize time has faded along, I once looked at varying photos of her daily.  Daily.  Well, even now, in the background of my redundant daily padding within my home are hanging framed sketches of her (and others, of course) that I may not directly even look upon, but which my subconscious mind tolls away sculpting that virtual-clay-model of her.

The point is, I think I did this both purposefully and now incidentally because, having never met her in the flesh, having never even spoken to her by phone, a fear exists that would devastate me to my core that should we cross paths randomly, that I might not recognize her at all.

This is, subliminally at least, part of the thrill of happening across more current pictures of her, that as this 1-½ decades passes and she ages as do we all, my memory banks are editing and storing and probably predicting future course of her subtle changes in beauty and maturity.

All of which is to say, quite unexpectedly, upon Tumblr, completely not identified nor in any way connectable to her current or former life at all, and with the environment of the photo (the props, if you will) making zero sense in relation to what actually very little I know of her supposed life, meaning it probably isn’t her but instead some doppelganger, it made me smile, made me happy, made my day when I saw this picture of her.

At least, I think it’s her.  It looks like her. The dangle of the wispy dark hair, the shapes of the tips of her fingers, that purse of the lips, the comfort with her body seating splayed upon random depths of thought in layers of crumpling papers tactically evolving across the floor.  It surely is the woman I’ve never met for whom my blog-only love continues, content within its habitual distance of never with a side order of treasured memories of emotions.

(photo source: stories.com via share from everythingyoulovetohate)