more than watchmen for the morning

heathrow

I really should be in bed by now.  It’s not that it’s late, it’s that I need to sleep because that is just something that I don’t get to enjoy the way I used to. I went through most of this year with barely the right kind of sleep at all. I thought that when I came back to England things would have been a little different. Maybe a new bed, maybe a new house, maybe a new rhythm to my days.  Yet still, I wake every night. 

I remember the very earliest hours of my elementary school days; how I would sleep like a rock. I would go to bed late at night (maybe 10pm) on a Sunday night with the sounds of Rick Dee’s and the Weekly Top 40. I sampled the very best of American pop music from that twin bed with the light-up globe positioned perfectly on the desk by the window, my clear telephone with the red cord standing sentinel by my bed just in case someone called. I would lay awake for what seemed like ages listening through all those songs. Eventually, in my last spring in that house, in that autumn childhood, I heard a song called “Mr. Jones” on that countdown, and so I met one of my favorite bands for the next  20 years. 

My grandmother would come in to wake me early in those cold, winter mornings.  She would try but I would be half dead, barely registering a pulse. She would say, “10 minutes” and go to pop some cheese-on-toast into the oven.  I would stagger again to the couch, where I would sleep some more. I honestly don’t know how I ever made it to school at all, though I know that I was insistent on riding the bus because that was what it meant to be grown up in my 1st grader’s mind. 

I think about sleep so much because I lay awake in the middle of the night praying for it, wishing for it, remembering what it once was to get eight straight and crisp hours. 

But yesterday I woke at five to drive my friends to the airport. They were the last of my best friends on this island to leave.  We set our sails south to London Heathrow, arriving by the time that many of you were probably going to bed from whatever Saturday night excursions you were led on in your respective hemisphere. 

I said goodbye to them, the way that I said goodbye to Robert and Natalie and Benjamin, the way I said goodbye to Lauren Birkett last week, the way, in essence, I said goodbye late one night in July. 

Which is to say that I’ll see you again but I don’t know when. I will see you again but I don’t know who you’re going to be. I know that I’m not going to be who I am right now the next time we lock eyes, we take hands, and we remember the faint scent of home that is carried by everyone that we have ever loved.  

Nathan and I drove to Indiana one week several years ago and I forced him to listen to “Mr. Potter’s Lullaby” on repeat. I thought that Adam Duritz had discovered a new poetry like El Dorado or the philosopher’s stone. Saying goodbye to Nathan yesterday, I knew that he was not the same man who took that trip with me so long ago.  

Jenn and I officially became friends even further back with a trip to Octane. Upon a little bit of reflection, I recollect how many of the most beautiful and painful and peaceful and tense relationships of my life were borne in that little bricked house of the west Atlantan hipster. Jenn and I were friends and Nathan and I became friends and somehow, through the way of such things, they fell in love. I’ve enjoyed being near them for every bit of it. I have rarely met people so much suited for one another. 

And they have been my friends, my confidants, my laughter, and often- my tears.  Yet the time comes for us to saddle up our lives and head out west again because this is the way of us who left Europe a couple of hundred years ago.  West is just in our blood, it is where we go, it is where we belong.  So Nathan and Jenn go on in peace back to that wild expanse so far away and filled with all of you that I carry in my memories here in the east.  

I drove off from the airport, completely alone and quiet, only the sound of airplanes taking off for God knows where.  I am sure that this season of my life is something like a crux, maybe even a crucible. It is a time where I am kind of alone.  Not necessarily lonely, but alone in some kind of fresh and hot fire. I know exactly what it is that I’m supposed to be doing right now. I have a clear task, something that was almost audibly spoken to me from the deep a couple of months ago. Nevertheless, there is life to know between the here and tomorrow.  So when I drove off into the north of London I thought about who the people are who are going to be in my life in the next couple of years. I wonder now what they are doing and who they are. I want to know if they are feeling empty, if they are feeling poured out completely, if they are having trouble going back to sleep.  Whoever they are, I’m looking for them, I’m waiting for them, I’m expecting them. I’ll see you soon, my friends.