Bulgarian Choral Music
Amtrak journaling
Monday, October 21, 2024
Monday night, another one. This one I spend on Amtrak back to Brooklyn from the glorious autumn that is elapsing in upstate New York.
Another Monday night of impounding stress but somehow this time the load feels feasible. Intense and scary, so scary, but going back into the fray of it after such a calming recharge I have been reminded to continue to feel that life will play out alright as it always has. As long as I am an ok boy. Across the aisle from me is my roommate and lover of two months. An insane sentence to write and one that makes me tense up a bit with its uncertainty and consequence.
I’m listening to Demon Days and thinking about Liam and the night last October when I found out he had died. Kieran and I had just ended a break that should have been telling of the end. I missed him for the first two nights and then was calm. I shake my head a little at the fact that I let that continue as long as it did, hurt him a bit more than the minimum, because I could not realize the truth of a doomed relationship even when it stood right in front of me. Maybe it was the second night after our break ran out. I had gone for a long walk with Timothy, up and down Broadway, up and down West End, up and down Riverside Drive. We ended up on the swings and settled into the tension. I got home to a missed call from Wally. Rang him back. Liam had turned to meth a year or so earlier and on a bad high had gone to his roof and jumped.
That night I lay on the floor of my yiayia’s kitchen and listened to the Bulgarian choral music so fittingly playing on New Sounds. John Schaefer always knows.
Rather than recite the self-inflicted misery I lived out for the next few weeks to those songs I will share that today I played one of the same while driving down a beautiful winding road in farm country with someone I feel for and who was also in the mood for soul splitting church music.
Someone I feel for but cannot yet share these dark darks. Dark deep darks that I am ok with but do not trust others to be. So in thick water on the shallow end the song was played, and it was beautiful still.