*
There is a story, a beautiful story, about grace and the sea. And my heart is trying to explain it to my mind. And as the heart fumbles over the few mind words it speaks and the mind clumsily interrupts and stammers and looks foolish with bewilderment, they both begin to laugh: first at each other, then at themselves. And as the laughter flows into unison, they form one tongue, speaking, as graceful as a stone skipping across water, striking the perfect spot of each wave. Among these waves I am swimming, watching the expressions of this new tongue skip all about me as it goes this way and that, never rebelling against its natural course, yet beautifully independent, making friendly suggestions to the world. I am diving down and leaping up, spouting water into the air, sometimes choking on the salt, eyes burning, but laughing. Always laughing. At night as I sleep, ghosts play with me by pulling off whatever I'm using for covers. I awaken and laugh some more with them. And it occurs to me I am becoming a child again.
The story is a story of sentipentsaris, the getting together of the heart and mind. It fell upon me one day while sitting in a tiny room with smoldering peat fire and rain pelting against the windows, basking in love but saturated with pain. And once that pain was let in, it created just the right darkness in which to dream of the creation of a perfect world. And this dream was not the first step in creating a perfect world, this dream was the creation of a perfect world.
Months later and thousands of miles away, I fell in love with a woman but didn't tell her. One autumn night we were part of a group who walked out into the thick woods, to a clearing where dozens of people gathered around a bonfire. She and I, instinctively and almost immediately, explored away from the gathering and made our way through more woods to the water, all the while talking of dreams, memories, and the sky. When we reached the water, we took in the moon and stars, glowing on the water, the drifting fragrances, the distant sound of music, the electric lights of civilization across the bay... all the elements of this perfect world.
As we tossed stones out into the darkness of the water, she asked me, "Do you believe in ghosts?"
I stopped what I was doing, looked deeply into the most beautiful eyes I had ever seen, and with greater clarity than I had ever before possessed, I said, "I believe in everything."
*
(note: the organizers of Portland Cocktail week in no way guarantee experiences comparable to the ones described above. The experiences described above are merely the thoughts of a bored writer with no better outlet to express his ideas than this antiquated "cocktail blog." Thank you.)
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