Eighteen

Leg shakes, and then shakes some more

Restless foot, tapping out the percussion of confusion, of his conflicting wants

All in the poignant melody of adolescence and first love, first sex and first belonging

 

It’s a conundrum, isn’t it?

When the future is so expansive

Blinking and dazzling in its uncertainty

Trembling with potential and possibility

With brightly lit roads and textbooks brimming and dinner parties spilling

All played to the accompaniment of jazz and trombone, acoustic guitar

Black and white piano keys

 

He imagines one room of approving teachers, heads nodding

Another room full of crotchety judges, gavels banging

And a third room full, this time, with small town referees  -

Self-anointed but insecure all the same – pursing their lips round cold, metal whistles

But then thinking better of it and letting their lips fall

 

Uncertain, after all, about how to keep score

 

Those referees, he quietly laughs to himself,

Those would be the students

Himself one among them

 

All those gate keepers and their damn arrogance

His own damn arrogance

His own damn confusion

 

But the girls

Ah, there would be girls, too

 

They’d wear knee socks and tall boots

Bangs dyed pink would tickle their eyebrow piercings

A small tattoo of a black bird – a crow, perhaps - or maybe a turtle hatchling

-       tucked ever so delicately behind an ear

So tiny that he’d have to be in kissing distance to even see it

 

But he’d walk that distance

He knew he would

His fingers would travel that fretboard

His thumb and pinky – calloused now – would span that gap

Because he was practiced, after all

and loving and compassionate

and capable and smart and, just like his mother promised

 

So awfully talented, so painfully worthy

 

It worried her, his future

It worried her to the quick

 

She wanted him to seize it

To grab it like a spring time plum or a summer peach

Gobble it in one mouthful

Quick, fast

Do it now, take it now

 

But growth and learning keep their own time and can’t be measured

There’s no recipe with tidy increments calling for a dash of this and a sprinkling of that

Self-realization, self-confidence,

Wherewithal and know-how

They can’t be prodded and ushered in

Like a girl in a prom dress, like the rolling credits to a film

 

All that marches alone

Marches to its own rhythm

A metronome whose pendulum weight marks the groove

At its own discretion

 

So she’ll have to sit back and wait

Circle the nest in her nightly vigilance

Hawkish, but ineffective just the same

 

His eye hones in on the girlfriend he has today

The daily comfort he has in home and his childhood valley

Tangled up in her soft brown hair and ivory skin

She clings to him and he to her

And their whispers sound like routine and safety and what’s knowable and here and now

And oh so very familiar and cozy and safe and kind but treacherous, too

Because it could be a trap - or not

 

He scratches his head, befuddled.

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My Love, My Reckoning