It would've been hard to do something else, to as it were, run away from the circus and become an accountant.In the midst of this mess that the devil has made, there are very good things indeed. Because when God closes a door, Satan detonates another bomb and blows a hole in the wall, after all.
~Samuel West
In spite of his efforts, good things. Maybe even better by tonight.
Ruth leaves for band camp this morning. I can hardly believe it when I look at her. She is all lip gloss and Hello Kitty and strange elaborate hair styles one day and still forgetting to even brush the next day. She is her mother in slightly (hardly) smaller form. Almost twelve. The witching age, by my definition, kept from her in order to allow her to practice flight without the weight of a history that doesn't need to be shared.
Last night Lochlan put on one hell of a show as a sendoff for her. Fire on the cliff. Any hint of rust on his talent has been rubbed away and he is the showman once again. Hardly an eighth as loud as Ben without a mic, a more visceral, touchable awe surrounds him. He encourages massive involvement, we have to clap, cheer and follow his instructions or it doesn't come off as well but it isn't hard, for he is very very good at this, and was doing it long before anyone else I know.
By the end he had taken off his shirt, his curls were wet with the effort even but his smile never faltered and his focus never wavered, locked on the task at hand. The batons flew higher and higher still as his stories kept up a pace that left me gloriously dizzy until I remembered to watch him and not the fire. Fire is hypnotic. Fire is warm. Just like Lochlan. The man who exists at one hundred and five degrees on paper and a thousand degrees in reality is wrapping up his show and my brain has gone off on another tangent and when I bring it back around the final baton has been caught and he is extinguishing them and cleaning up. He jams his t-shirt in his back pocket and tells the children that it's time to go inside and get ready for bed. There will be another show on the weekend, when Ruth returns. When everything changes once again.
I saw a hint of who Lochlan used to be right then and there. Before everything changed and then continued to change until we were slipping off the carousel horses with nothing to hold onto, as it spun faster and the music rushed in to fill the void. That's what life has been for us, an out of control merry-go-round where the horses with their wild painted faces loom large in our eyes and then rotate back into the endless parade. My hair is tangling around the pole and I will never reach the brass rings and on principle no one must ever do it for you or it won't count.
And there he is again.
A much older version of that perfect seventeen-year-old boy, who walked across the beach and stuck his face directly into the yellow cotton candy I was holding until he could grasp the paper cone with his teeth. I started laughing, not the least bit upset because the yellow candy was banana-flavored and I didn't like it at all but then I started to choke and he tried to get his face back out of the candy floss and couldn't and he resorted to pulling off huge strands and putting them in my hair and the harder I fought him the more he covered me until it was all over both of us and we peeled off our clothes and jumped, naked, into the sea and I picked the rest of the bits of floss out of his beard while he held me afloat in a wave, far out from shore.
You coming in?
I snapped out of my reverie and nodded up at him automatically. In the light his hair is the color of brass. The rings I tried so hard to reach once upon a time so that I could share one with him. The luck that never held for Lochlan. I have my fingers crossed that maybe there was simply an unusual and unforeseen twenty-eight year delay.