Across the night

I watch the container ships move slowly across the water just below the horizon. They move so slowly yet with such implacable purpose. Turn away from the window and when you turn back, they are gone.

Tug boats scurry out to meet them, airplanes prepare their descent into Aeroparque, a new metropolis rises in Puerto Madero. The city is changing so fast that if you close your eyes, you will miss an entire generation. We are on the edge of overcoming ourselves.

During the day I can convince myself that all this bustling is meaningful, but when the night descends so does my harder self, the self that was annealed in the hot oil of time, the screams of loss, the torment of longing. That self has seen it all – and beyond. It looks cold and hard at life and knows its beauty and its pain but mostly the immense sorrow that it is all over so soon.

That self does not suffer fools, least of all my foolish self.

Nights I am rapacious and genuine. I cannot forge a smile or indulge people I dislike. I go like a lead ballast to those few true things I know. In the night there is no gray area: there is desire and there is truth but beyond that there is only a vast empty expanse.

As I played my solo last night on the “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” tears rolled down my face. This is not music we are making, this is life and death, as it always has been. If I am not putting it all on the line, then I might as well be dead. Truth is, when I am not putting it on the line, I feel dead.

I hurry away from those dead spots, the windless doldrums where nothing moves and our souls sink to the bottom of the thick liquid. If I allow myself to hang out there, I know I will suffocate and die.

So I hurry to the edge, in search of dusk, careening to that place where it is dark and I am stripped of the volatile spirits and left with the heavy, defining ones. I cannot see what is out there; there is nothing to hold to, nothing to aim towards. We are alone, marooned and splendid.

Across the night, everything is on the line – just the way it should be.