Eliot as a Teen

Dearests:

At nearly eight-thirty I sit, slumped and smiling, to the sound of Neko Case. Her voice pours pure and strong, like a fifth of good bourbon over new ice. Something in that song transports me to the place where I am twelve and gangly. It must be winter because the rain lashes the roofs in my neighborhood and I am standing outside. There are lights on in my father’s house, but the door is locked and I wait under the eaves for a figure that never comes.

Here, deep in the metaphor of my adolescence, a time when all that was supposed to be wasn’t, and the specter of fatherhood haunted someone else’s attic, the obviousness of it hits me: We all need a siren of sorts, a voice that drags us from the creaking decks and sagging rigging of our consciousness into the frigid waters. There, beneath foam flecked waves we can release our last breaths, and settle amidst the kelp, webbed fingers stroking thick locks.

Isn’t that what lust is—a hunger for our own undoing? Aren’t these heedless passions a selfish wish to be reduced to the struggle for breath and uncontrollable shuddering? When I hear of this sort of love, I can only think of the losses I have endured, those moments of falling in and being dragged down.

Prufrock had it backwards, but then he was the singer of a different ballad. Let us go then, where the voice carries us no further.