The morning song

July 26, 1980

Birds chirp over the brown river with the rising of the sun, a strange music accompanied by the rumble of trucks over the Wall Street Bridge – a kind of rock and roll that makes me roll over in my sleep if not Beethoven.

It is far from harmonious, the steel and concrete moaning and groaning under the relentless lovemaking of rubber wheels, and I wake into the midst of it, adding to its confusion.

This is a morning when nothing said or done can make any of it seem real, and each breath I take comes with the assault of sound.

I roll out from the sleeping bag, leaving her warm body in its protected cocoon, sleep and dreams protecting her from the cacophony I endure.

It has been a rough night with only two hours of actual sleep. At age 29, I feel 69, and feel on the verge of dying, but it is living I suffer from, though in the back of my head I think that each day is one more baby step towards death – a chilling and depressing thought I put out of my head, letting my mind wander through the noise, putting off also the thought that soon she will have to make up her mind about what she will do and where she will go, and how the psychological distance we feel growing between us will soon grow into geographical distance, and our lives won’t be the same.

I have no place in her world and I know it, having already set my feet on a particular path she can’t or won’t step onto, her dreams are bigger dreams than my dreams our, her ambitions like unfolding wings that will soon soar to places I can’t go.

I need to learn to appreciate the moment we are in while we are in it, and not look too far ahead into the hazy heights of some future neither of us can predict. I need to savor these weekend mornings the way I do that first sip of brew, letting it shake me awake with gentler fingers than the racket the trucks make rumbling outside.

I crave coffee and the consciousness it brings, and the curtain it draws over these early morning fears, as sleep clings to me and I drag myself out of that world into the waking world, trying desperately to break free.

I am far less ambitious than she is. While I love to soar, it is more like a hawk soar than the rising of an eagle, a flight than lingers over the lip of the world, allowing me to gaze at what goes on, not a blind furious flight desperately seeking to reach heights beyond anything anyone else has achieve. I do not wish to be flying so high over the world that I forget there is a world or that I belong to it, and can’t see where it is I took off from or a place in the ordinary world where I can land again.

Sometimes I soar like she does in my dreams, seeing myself in some remote place, on some remote rock, a grand and powerful figure, but one that is quite alone, having soared so high as to leave everyone else behind, such heights scare me more than the approach of death. I never want to get so far up that I can’t hear the morning song, the rush of traffic, the gush of water, the other more ordinary birds chirping in my ears.