TWAS 506: Lullacry

Love in These Arms

506 · 25 January 06

Lullacry: Vol. 4

There are only so many songs, in the same sense that there are only so many cities. Which is to say that they exist in a space that is technically finite, and only occasionally expanded, but that their variation is subjectively finite or infinite depending less on their characteristics than ours. And were they any more finite, besides, we can only reach them along relentless time. We go away and come back, and home and away have changed behind us, and us by our travels. Everywhere we revisit, we see now through wherever else we have been, and how we remember the last time, and how we are remembered.

And thus, even when we search out the comfort of rewriting the old songs, and particularly when the urge arises out of empathy and not envy, we can never exactly duplicate anything we have known. Evil is no match for kids growing up with its cartoons, destruction helpless in the face of ruins we remember as forts, entropy rewound by however we think it freed us. Every step we take retraces a million others before or after, and yet is the only one we will ever have taken right now.

So the shadows of the night we ran with now glitter with lights, and our love is strewn with our battlefield monuments, and we still belong together. So we open our eyes forever. So we fall for survivors of heart-shaped scars, disentangled from the embraces of love and death, making new butterflies out of collections of stolen wings. So we have licked our most godless endeavors with the tongues of our favorite gods. So we have opened all our darkest chests of wonder and found them filled with angels to die for, and the boots of faeries we thought we had dreamed.

And so we live, and sing of love in all of these arms.