amor pondus meum

and can you lie next to her
and confess your love, your love
as well as your folly?
and can you kneel before the king
and say i’m clean, i’m clean?

—“white blank page”, mumford & sons

love and folly. an exercise in synonyms, maybe. but there is a loveliness to that: to the blind leap, the eternal jump, the suspension into forever— or, alternatively, at least until the ground. 

an argument made over lunch today: those who can convince themselves that their lies are truth are the happiest, if not morally then emotionally. depression is the natural result of being a realist. the people i know who are realists and honest about it write some of the most heartbreaking things about the world, and they are all true. they are genuine in a way i don’t know how to be. i admire it, in all its sadness, because there is no beauty but in truth. honesty has its own economy— the cost is high. the collateral is unbearable. 

can we pay the price, then? of laying in the bed we’ve made. of speaking the words we’ve held in, releasing them out into that unforgiving space, all air and weight. of being any kind of thing, unconditionally: loathed, loved, and all the matter in between. of seeing our world as it is, created not in spite of our own hands but because of them, built up from our crumbling foundations. 

i don’t mean to say it’s not beautiful, because it is, and heartbreakingly so: because all beauty comes from honesty, and all honesty births pain. and that’s not something we can be faulted for, because all we’re given is this life and all its mechanisms— we make them work the best we can. some marry and others don’t; some go to college and others straight to the workforce; some believe and others don’t.

some grow old. others don’t. 

and those are the ones i miss: the ones i never got to see grow old. those like buds on a stem that never open, full of the vast potential of beauty but unable to expose it. these are my beloved, my departed, the ones i remember at every Mass during our prayer for the dead. those who never grew old because life was too beautiful or terrible or both, because the opportunity was taken from them or because they took it from themselves. i think of the kind of beautiful they were, the potential they had for being breathtaking: for all the art and love and glory the world lost in losing them. for their own love and folly. for the things i should have known, but couldn’t, but didn’t, but mustn’t have: because we are islands, we men of the world. and all i can do to honor those i have lost is to give them my own love and folly, to trust that they kneel before the king and are clean— cleaner still than us that remain here, left to bloom on a sparse stem, the empty shell of their buds dropping soft into the wind around us.

for kenneth, 
march 3, 1990-november 2, 2008.
for in the wind that is around me,
there you also are.