John Grady Cole

You died too young but were immortalized for all our sakes by Cormac McCarthy, that sage of the desert. I read your words in my Paris bathtub, bathed variously in filtered blue, red and green light, I read you driving down the highway, and walking along the beach, a fugitive, my life immersed in your art. When you felt, crossing the border, that your father had died, I was pierced, my eyes watered. Such a feeling could not but be true, though it has no basis in fact. In John Grady I understood myself as a lover. My love is hopeless, fatal, that is it's essence, the source of its sweetness is it's impossibility - and how sweet it the realization of the impossible! The moments of its realization must be immortal, they could fill my short life, as they filled yours, with thousands of lives of unrealized, undaring love. For myself, I imagine her coming to me, many years from now, needing my help with matrimonial problems, how could I refuse those eyes, of course I would take it on, there would be no question of billing, though you insist, rebuke it could be no other way. I will think of what is, what could have been, it will leave me, when she has gone, in unblinking silence. We could have been saved all this, those children could be mine. Alas. Thinking over time, when the dream felt so close to being real, and would have been real too, it was not that it could never be true, but that I could never see a reason why it shouldn't! The years would have haunted us, we would have been aged. But such feelings never die. They cannot starve and cannot be burnt. They live on even when the lovers fall, as John Grady Cole did, into eternity. My soulmate John Grady, the tatters in these paperbacks do not age your memory in my heart. Through you I begin to understand myself, and the death that will come, in her. What am I to do? There is no handbook, no law but the heart and I must rely on myself. She won't come to me but I am doomed to never leave and will be there, as I have before. Now I find myself standing against the darkness of existence, with no recognizable god to hear the prayers I pray earnestly, and only suffering to beat me down till death. Just the one hope makes it all worthwhile, even if I can attach to it no reason. We are together in our loneliness, riding alongside Comanche ghosts by moonlit trails, our laws shaped by the winds, John Grady.