Daron's Guitar Chronicles Vol. 13 (contd)

1098 Under the Bridge

Under the Bridge

(Happy Christmas Eve, folks!)
—
Ziggy and I had a surprisingly nice dinner for being cooked in the mini-kitchen of the extended stay place. Ha! That tells you how my standards had changed. This "mini" kitchen was easily twice the size of the one in the Fenway studio I used to live in. Somewhere along the way Ziggy had bought some packaged "fresh" ravioli and sauce, and a chunk of parmesan to grate over it, and some farmstand tomatoes and... wait a second...

I think that was the night he tried to make a tomato-cucumber salad, but the cucumber he'd bought at a farmstand on the side of the road was actually a zucchini. It wasn't bad, actually, sliced thin with salad dressing, just hilarious. At first he tried to pretend it was intentional, except once I started kind of giggling about it, he ended up laughing his head off, too.

Not quite as funny as coyotes stealing the Christmas turkey off the back porch, but, you know. Still funny. As we sat there after eating, it felt for a minute like we'd recaptured the feel of our stay in the Back Bay apartment, our little experiment in domestic couplehood.

I suddenly wished we were back there, back then, maybe. Even though our time there had never been angst free. I had been recovering from everything in South America, and reeling from the whole left turn the music industry took into grunge, and I remembered sharply finding out that Freddie Mercury had died.

But that had been when Jordan was still alive. And before we knew Claire would soon not be.

Ziggy reached for my hands across the corner of the little dining table, and kissed my wedding ring (partner ring? what the heck was the right word for it?) and then my various scars. "What are you thinking about?"

"Why, do I look thinky?"

"Pensive, yeah."

"Just thinking about how I felt different about life and death before Jordan." I didn't have to specify what about Jordan. Not saying it made it clear.

"And how do you feel now?"

"Oh, you want me to put words to it? Jeez." I wasn't joking. I kissed his hands in return and tried to articulate it. "I'll tell you how I want to feel about it. I want to feel like I'll feel better about life once I figure out how to feel about death. But death sucks."

He looked like he was holding in a laugh. In my head I imagined a cover of J. Geils "Love Stinks" except with "Death Sucks" as the lyrics. Yeah, that felt about right.

"Okay, so you want to feel like all this death is going to result in you feeling better about life and being alive?" He said it slowly, like he was trying to follow my logic, or lack thereof. "But you're not sure it will?"

"Basically. What if it just makes me feel like everything sucks and is pointless because we're all going to die anyway?"

"That, dear one, is called existential angst, and you've already gone through that."

I think he meant in the water tank. Right. "I want to believe that when this is done, I'm going to have an unshakeable appreciation for every sweet moment in life."

"That sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy if I ever heard one," he said, standing up to take the dishes to the sink. "Or at least like a song idea."

I slumped. "Song idea. Yeah. About that."

Before I could say more, though, the phone rang. Ziggy picked up the extension on the kitchenette counter. "Hello? Oh, hi, Patty. Sure, I've got a minute to talk." He gave me a look, like, well, this is unexpected. And motioned me toward the bedroom phone. "Daron's here, too. Should we put you on speaker?"