Thirty years ago,
I would have waited for sympathy
from the heartless slug working in the airport bar.

And then I would promise to give up whiskey
for the rest of the week, and I’d tell the slug
as sweetly as possible to stress me out on martinis instead.

And then I’d decide I still preferred whiskey,
but I’d be in this manic head-space to keep every promise
made, starting from the point when year had finally granted me
the will to live the week before.

When the light above my bed may or may not have briefly become
something imposing, beautiful, impossible to ignore,
and potentially dangerous.

I would think that the moment
would be as good a time as any
for my grandfather to walk in, take a seat to my left,
and not recognize me.

And I’d stay far away from correcting him.
I’d just wonder what he’d been up to
over the last few years.

I would wait for anything to give me the courage
and sanity to stay away from every flight
that would eventually get me
to your neighborhood in Aberdeen, South Dakota.

Find someone who remembered you
when you were young, stupid, limitless and stubborn,
and tell them how sorry I will always be
that I couldn’t get you to stay in that night,
and resent me for fifty more wonderful years.

I’d probably say that to people
who had never met you as well.

But I wouldn’t want to.
I wouldn’t want to go.

I would try to sit in the airport bar
until all the big airplanes,
and all the little theaters of conversation
made me nauseous, dizzy, and violent.

“Go home”,
my grandfather would say out of the fragile blue,
and do what the graffiti on that old department store
you’re suddenly thinking about tells you to do.

“Sleep for a thousand weekends.”

And I would.

And it wouldn’t actually be 2010.
And I could still smoke in airport bars.

And I wouldn’t be on my second day
of being completely wide-awake.
Marveling at how many state lines
you can cross when you have no idea
which reality to trust anymore.

I wouldn’t be laughing warmly,
in a forever and ever kind of way,
at all those people who have told me
I was probably born and raised in the wrong decade.

And you wouldn’t be appearing sporadically
in the passenger seat,
looking the way you did that one night
when I finally danced with you,
and when I finally figured we really might
get married eventually.

You wouldn’t be telling me to drive faster
in a voice that would freeze
the kamikaze angels stuck in hell.

02/10/2013

Posted on 02/10/2013
Copyright © 2025 Gabriel Ricard