The Black Dog

Black Dog

It isn’t sudden or violent. The Black Dog.

It comes and you don’t notice it. It lays down at the very peripheral of your vision.

It waits until you are used to it in that spot and it moves – just a bit – closer. Before you know it, you are stepping around it, stepping over it.

Then it gets larger. And larger.

And it comes to sit next to you. And you’re strangely comforted by it.

And then it is in your lap. And then on your chest.

Someone may come by and remark upon it, upon the need to make it go away. They shoo at it. But it just regards them with no expression.

And your eyes look the same when you wonder why they bother. Because it is so troublesome to bother about things.

 

Chestnuts are growing

Do what you will, Winter comes

The Black Dog brings it

 

 

Image: By Aura2 (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

I saw you once.

I saw you once in Las Vegas.

Your daughter was shopping and you were entertaining tourists in the air conditioned corridor outside the shoe store.

My friend wanted to meet you.

But I was raised in Los Angeles, where everyone is expected to ignore the famous. We pretend they’re ordinary. Just another shopper in the market, in line for the classic movie, getting a Cinnabon. Shopping for shoes at Manolo Blahnick.

And what would I say you had not heard a million times?

So we walked away.

I wish we hadn’t.

I read you’ve gone – that you left everyone.

And now I know what I would have said.