I was sitting outside of St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans sipping on my second glass of Absinthe with loved ones, when it happened.
Quietly, during a moment of solitude, I prayed for the first time in years. I wasn’t asking for salvation nor forgiveness. It was a sub-sonic Thank You to…I don’t know who. I can’t honestly say I’m a Believer but the prayer felt appropriate because of my setting. It was a satellite moment for me: transmitting gratitude across stars and nebulas, hoping my message found the right receiver. It was a moment I was thankful for. Being in the company of the ones you love the most knowing that just a week before all of that could have been destroyed. It always keeps a part of the mind sober no matter how many times Absinthes’ Green Fairy babbles her narcotic lullaby’s in your ear.
A mid-tempo salsa song that I couldn’t recognize played in the background as the barista lit the sugar cube ablaze, readying my next glass. In an audible haze I began to think that every song I heard that night would be on a jukebox at my funeral. I was in love with the moment. It could have all ended right there. No complaints. But as the fog lifts momentarily you realize that so much of life is still ahead of you, teeming with moments like this.
No, the funeral will have to wait. It’s time to start my life.
Again.
But at the very least I will have amassed a more size-able collection of songs to play when that funeral finally comes.
New Orleans, and the French Quarter in particular, is a place where one can imagine becoming a famously wretched drunk of an author. I pictured myself plenty of times sitting on a balcony with a ceiling fan spinning above and whose structural integrity was suspect at best, sipping from a glass with 3 fingers worth of my favorite Rye Whiskey and just the right amount of ice cubes clanking around while I oafishly assaulted a broken keyboard trying to hammer out my next thought onto e-paper. It would be a lonely life, isolated with the very thing that tortures all solitary creatures: their own thoughts. The endless “what if’s” and “If only”‘s bouncing around an otherwise empty skull. No endgame in sight. No resolution to the cyclic thinking. It could very easily be my life. Could very easily had been my life had I not been given a moment for redemption.
There would be one temporal coordinate that I could from then on point to and indicate “that’s when I changed my life”. It started with being honest, first with myself and then with the woman I loved the most. It was brutal, it was devastating and it was heart wrenching. For years, I had been keeping up a series of lies. It would be easy to admit that it was infidelity but that wasn’t the case. I had concocted a fantasy world and made the woman I loved believe it. I made her believe in things that had never happened and never would happen. The same writing and creative talent she so lavishly praised about me, I used to create and maintain lies that would devastate her. But the day finally came, as it always does, that being honest was the only way to get out of the cycle. Whether I would be dead or alive was still a matter not decided.
To be continued…
