First Goodbye
What is it that sets a fracture? I think of that day and that break...certainly I was telling Ramona as much as possible that I DID love her, that she was the most charmeuse. That she could stimulate the senses like wine and french coffee...
So happily/unhappily we left the nest along the usual backdoor backyard beach white sand and blue sky and the mother bitch barking at us until up close enough to clown with me and get her licks on...the feeling I had, somewhere between clemency and misanthropy, had me on the brink of the waters of life and truth and I was miserable, dying to rend my heart from its winter-branchéd immunity...I could feel it beginning to break because I knew I thought this thing was a good thing. I wanted it. I was contriving to get it. That was a guarantee. “Weep with them that weep” Ahh brilliant I was a walking conman in Central American torn by the heartache coming all over again...how many times had I wailed in malfeasance over my stupid and vapid desires? Even the etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. It is likely that the first time I fell in love it was sybaritic and noteworthy and I imagine that someone took note! I took notes! One after another...notes, notes. Note that the first goodbye gives nature a new thing.
We spent the countdown minutes at Estelles By the Sea, under the palapa roof, listening to the genius of Mana, a Mexican band that Ramona gave a bawdyhouse exclamation to when the CD started to play...magic and genius it was clear to me right away that this music could repair the decay of things...and she was taking its being played at that moment as a sign and her eyes glistered and the universe for a second or two was a celebration to me and I knew then I would have my heartache and my longing...The boat was arriving at any minute to take passengers back across the reef to Belize city, a forty five minute ride rain or shine—sometimes with a canopy, sometimes without...so the sun bright and sand light, and rain out there past the emerald byway and a few locals starting to wait on the dock near sharks bar, and the single gas pump, the stacks of bottled soda, everything, everyone sitting in the aurora of the gone sunrise, this tiny beach Caribbean town with necessary peoples, such an organic expression, all arranged for the first goodbye—I’m in my blue jeans and a white t-shirt, tan five days already ingratiated and set, destitute alive endorsed, a stag of the forest with no need for goodbyes or eulogy i.e. true story...enough to begin to not fortify the self but to completely shatter it with a thousand primary adios’ and a couple rounds of fucking white standing...Jesus. It was near the present: why did I think that there was something to do presently? And another thing, how far would I go to be there? These were some of the inanities that were going through my mind, trying to stay in my skin, knowing that sentiment changes while truth has no change, and different love records were now spinning on my phone mind and Ramona looked radiant...
There was not a single guarantee anywhere, no sister or mother...just a sticky moment of separation...the first goodbye and her stunning radiance...We had drug it out as long as we could before she might run the risk of missing the boat, and she was broke and expected by her boyfriend on the mainland, Lionel was his name I think, and he had a deeper grip on her than I first suspected or that she led me to believe but I had better gear and tactics...I had to let her go, let her slip off that dock into the emerald future which was shaping up to something looking a lot like pain...the boat was already half full with little women and crooked honest men, the young all-business captain and his teenage vibrato crew hustling ropes and instructions, storing baggage in the hull, and spinning with simple energy and cigarettes...
We stood on the dock, it was 8:30, the breeze completely revised and redesigned from yesterday...running through others then around us...we were so close and filled with triste, that Latin-bent sadness, a pallid melancholy made by chick biddies and fools like me, and with the right kind of eyes, which were those of Ramona the iris of brown and sweet coffee and for all I know little Guatemalan Indian butterflies hovering around our heads in imaginative orange and red, the humid air could not pass through us... on and on as goodbyes go, repeat and yawn, shuffle, look into eyes again then finally someone cold and heartless says OK and turns, loads like the ordinary soul quickly becoming after the misty pocket of sweet señorita dreaming, and like that you find yourself walking away because the first goodbye has gone on much too long already...
-Michael Price
