Of Wine and Graves

Which version of reality is this now? Because I feel like we’ve played this game before, and this is where the ennui has set in, and our bones feel weary in our skins. This is the part of the story where Achilles wonders what he’s really fighting for; where he looks to the sky and wishes for the Styx to give him back the vulnerability it has taken from him.

Was it relief he felt when the arrow landed? When he was made human again, to be freed from fighting a war that was never his. May his next lifetime have been more blessed.

I think we can relate to that, to escape the existential despair that nips at our feet, the dogma that hounds us. What are we really living for anyway?

Do you remember the wine we shared? It tasted coppery, like sweetened blood drawn from grapes. It’s a memory that has managed to remain intact in spite of all that has happened. Sweet, blissful escapism, that’s all it was. We drank because what else was there to do, but drink?

But this cycle, this cycle that we are in, at which point are we in? Rebirth. Death. To live. To die. To be born again.

I’m trying to make sense of it all, because it makes very little sense within the glass that I’m holding. The red liquid swirls in an intoxicating vortex, much like you back then. And I’m lost in it, lost and lustful, for something that is so far gone. So I ruminate, I ponder, I think endlessly on a wine that tastes far too rich for me, listening to piano composition too elegant for me. Those were your things. My brutish, aggressive nature prefers something coarser, something stronger. Loud, angry rock, and whisky that charrs at the throat. Even my own writing departs so wildly, unstructured, messy and complex. Deviant and undisciplined jazz versus your structured Bach.

I dream of the other lifetimes. I dream of the ones where we are happy. I dream of the ones where we are not. I dream of those in between; there are many of those. In each, there is a bottle of wine. It changes between lifetimes, but it is always a fine red.

But we never make it to the bottom. Somehow, I’m never sure why, one of us is clutching the bottle in front of the other’s grave. In some lifetimes, I am the one speaking the confession I never had the courage to say, as the fine red seeps into the freshly plowed earth. In others, I hear you speaking faintly, from six feet under, as the wine drips, coalescing with your tears.

A different circumstance each time with the same ending. I never remember the words we say, as hard as I try. But I know how they made me feel, and if anything has a chance to be real, I believe they have the best chance. Do you think we’ll ever be able to change the ending?

I don’t know. I don’t have all the answers, but I don’t think anyone truly does. Yet, staring down the crossroads, I would prefer the potential chaos of what is to come, than the dull mundanity of never knowing.

And that is the driving force to live by, to embrace the uncertainty, to learn to love disorder. Entropy, flux, change, the promise of renewal. Trees grow best after the scourge of fire, and so must we.

Because I wish to escape this limbo, and to enjoy that last glass with you.

Good wine deserves to be appreciated in good company.