Have there been moments in your life that you look back on with a sort of tantalizing bittersweetness? Where life seems to teeter on the edge of “just right” — but you know, with the benefit of hindsight, that the scale never quite tips in your favor?
I was making a list tonight of songs I’ve referred to in my journal over the past year and a half. I’m just a list-making, nostalgic sort of girl. But this journey took me back to a series of days (months, really) that were (are) sort of achingly sweet, despite their lack of fulfillment.
It left me craving my “Songs for the Almost” CD, and maybe that elusive fulfillment (that will not come). It left me, if not exactly sad, perhaps a bit melancholy.
Im glad you like Jeff Givens. Im also so proud of that mix cd title.
“Have there been moments in your life that you look back on with a sort of tantalizing bittersweetness?”
Once.
After the battle of Cinderforge, where my Hume armies had conquered the vast, combined might of both the goblin and orc forces, I stood alone in what was once a cornfield. The salt and blood that had soaked the ground that day guaranteed nothing would ever grow here again.
I had just finished cleaning my sword, Hurricalt, and I could taste the cleaning oils that were still on my fingers as I shucked and bit into the crawfish caught from the nearby river.
The men — the ones not seriously wounded, anyway — were happy, drunk off the battle’s afterglow and the strong grape fermentation Cookie had whipped up on the way out Sarlassa Valley thos emany months back. They had tied up a series of speakers and were listening some ancient band, “Blue Oyster Cult.”
Between the songs I could hear my hawk, Kittle, cry out in the air above me. His shadow circled around me.
There was no way I could have known what the following months would do to me and my men, and I wouldn’t have changed course even if I had known. I hurt when I think on that year, and the ten years after it I spent in prison, learning to live and fight again without a right arm.
But I smile when I think back on that day. I can close my eye and still feel the sun shing on my back, and hear Kittle and the music, and taste the crawfish and oil in my mouth.