everywhere blonde

I woke up today, rising slowly and pointlessly into loneliness, into a disquieting sense of unfamiliar emotional unrest - a reminder of the other side of love's coin, its hollowing absence - and found myself wrapped in strands of blonde hair. Flaxen remnants of my love's various stays I found, on my pillow, around my hand, on my face as I washed, and it made me inexpressibly - what?

Not happy, quite, for I miss her terribly, like a key misses its lock, like you miss a favorite recurring and recently elusive dream, I miss her. So I'm not in my usual, blandly positive morning-mood. But I'm not quite sad, either, for I know she's waiting there, cloistered in La Jolla's infecting aloofness, wrapped in her cloud-universe of clean linens, in her feigned and imagined hostility, and there's a calmness to my unrest, its edge is blunted.

I pondered the golden hair as I walked to the bathroom, it seemed so perfect, so shiny, so new. But there in the mirror, waiting for me, was the old familiar face, so tired, so flat, so creased and bagged and splotched, the tire tracks of time's SUV in my hair and on my cheeks.

I smiled at that face, sighed, washed and dressed, and came to work.

Yes, its Friday and I'm in love.

-ts

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