Three is a Magic Number
“01/01/2017 is not a magic number,” he says, “Start now. You know what to do. Write your truth now. Now, before its illegal, before it’s all punishable by death, before we all lose.”
But I didn’t hear him so well after the first bit about 1 1 2017 not being a magic number. There are magic numbers. I know there are. Three, three is a magic number – or so the song goes anyway. What was it that he said? Write my truth? If only it were that easy. Too many truths to choose from. That’s all I’ve got. Too may truths.
In one of them I live high up in a mountain with a bunch of cats and I never talk to anyone. In another, I live in a penthouse floating above the park and watch the tiny dots of ordinary people move around down on the dirty sidewalks. I want to go down and join them but something stops me. Probably, maybe I don’t have working legs and I think they’d laugh.
But that’s not it. No. No one would really care if my legs worked or not. Just me. I’d be the one who cared the most.
I’m taking a class on how not to care. The class is super popular. I had to wait months to get in. People are weary of caring, weary of fighting. We need someone to remind us why, to remind us that it might all be ok again.
Even if we won’t believe it.
Somewhere still, there is a little girl with pigtails, wearing blue, white, and purple plaid pajamas sitting cross-legged on a lime green couch. She’s watching School House Rock on the television, singing along. She knows three is a magic number. She remembers. No one else is in the house though they should be. She thinks they’re all just sleeping but they aren’t. They got up early and went to work and football practice or just down the street for a walk.
In another place, you are pacing in front of a big picture window. Rain is falling outside. You don’t hear me come in. I stand at the front door shaking the water from my hair and helmet and jacket. Finally, you turn.
“Oh thank god,” you say, “I was worried, so worried.” I laugh and tell you I’m fine, I ride in the rain all the time.
I wanted a house in the canyon but you told me it was impractical, too many long winding roads and we’d never get anywhere fast. How about the mountains, then, I asked and you smiled and said, ‘Someday, someday’, as if we had all the days in the world.
The day we met rain fell in sheets from the heavens but I didn’t feel it, couldn’t taste it. We were on an island in the Mediterranean riding bicycles up mountains and I thought I could touch the sky. We huddled together under the awing of a closed coffee shop, shivering though I don’t remember the cold. You suddenly reached over and pulled me into your arms. “We’ll be warmer like this,” you said. And I certainly couldn’t argue but I was so afraid my crazy beating heart would frighten you.
But it didn’t. You sang softly in my ear, “Three is a magic number.” I laughed, “Why that song?” You shrugged and said you didn’t know and pulled me even closer and I couldn’t help but wonder if you somehow saw that little girl with pigtails on the green couch by herself. I didn’t know how that could be possible but I was sure it was.
Maybe that’s what people mean when they say that someone looked right into their soul.
1 1 2017 isn’t a magic number, that’s for sure. And my truth is wonky and tired and worn. Time is never a straight line that I can make sense of. When the storms come I can’t always make it down from this mountain.
But that doorway in front of the coffee shop on Mallorca with your arms around me, with the rain falling and you singing in my ear, that doorway – I’m right there, I’m standing right there.
In all this time, I still haven’t moved.