I pressed my forehead into the flat screen display at my desk. The women who had been my girlfriend up until just a moment ago had slipped sobbing into the next room. I was both a mess, and felt an aloneness and wholeness that I had been craving. I had ended it – or, at least, I was the one who spoke the truth about the distance in the air between us.
Something had shifted in me a while ago and I had the familiar feeling of being just out of sync with my own life, just enough to be irritating, the real me living through a keyhole in the life size card board cut out man I presented. And had happened before, it had begun as mildly disconcerting and become deafeningly intolerable.
I didn’t know why I ached so badly. I had found myself in a similar position a few years beforehand in a moment where a trip to the local liquor store with my college girlfriend to get ice for a 4th of July bbq shifted abruptly in the parking lot, where i said the same unspeakable words as I could not contain this feeling any longer. Heading back towards my apartment with her it felt like the course of my narrative, fake life with its dwindling air supply was drawing to a close and soon, with her on a plane back to Seattle, I would be able to breathe again. When we arrived back at my apartment, putting the key in the lock felt relievingly optimistic. She trudged emotionally ahead of me to pack her bags. We had graduated a few months beforehand and this was our test run to answer the big question “what was it like living together?” But I already knew. As she flew into the bathroom to cry harder I was left standing in the living room. My attention settled on my 78 fender stratocaster, a guitar I had bought years ago after feeling inspired watching Robert Randolph’s fingers be absorbed by his 13 string pedal steel. There was something in the way he and other master musicians took and were taken by their instruments when they played that beckoned me. I had bought the guitar with a friend who’s father owned a music store and had told me it would be easy to get ripped off. While getting the deal of the century was usually my biggest priority this was different somehow. It had to feel right, like there was some kind of essence in this guitar that spoke to me. The purchase felt like a doorway, a vehicle through which I could access some deeper part of myself. Having felt the essence of others in their playing I knew the experience from the listening side and I wanted to touch the moment of creativity.
I got the guitar home and placed it in it’s cradle. I could pick it up, plug into the amp and just pluck notes and was utterly delighted. Lessons were slow and plodding and eventually my job at Apple called for a few weeks of overtime and I placed the guitar in its display harness for the last time where it sat gathering a progressively thicker layer of dust. Looking at it now, with a crying woman in the other room something inside of me woke up to a truth. The guitar, too, had met the same fate as these women had, where my internals had gone one way and they had gone another. It stood there like an obelisk, a mystical cautionary totem – beautiful, in, but no longer of my life, with none of my essence in it, no connection. Soon I would move to a new apartment. Everything would be held up to the light of my soul and weighed : “Do I still feel connected to this?” “Had this grown with me or had it been lost somewhere along the way?” This guitar that once represented the mastery I sought would not make the cut and be sold. I saw the once alive promise of mastery had been reduced to a static object, a possession apart from me that could be discarded. Unlike the guitars of the greats who would never put a price on their ax, this ones fate was sealed.