William Henderson

Morrissey knows why you don’t like him and doesn’t care.

An impossible-to-maintain feverish feeling that will fade, even though you don’t listen when everyone tells you that the impossible-to-maintain feverish feeling you feel will fade.

Go with the flow. Take your time. Don’t judge your own worth by comparing it to the person next to you. Life is a practice, not a competition. There is no winning, no losing. All you have to do is show up and try.

A new baby? Hope it cries all night. A long-overdue weight loss? Nothing you can do about those thighs. A new apartment? Hope the neighbors are loud. Sold your first novel? Hope it ends up remaindered.

Where you met and where you went on your first date, and how excited you were in the hours before your first date, and how nervous you were during your first date, and how badly you wanted a second date, even before the first date ended.

I will not watch It’s a Wonderful Life, and I will not watch Miracle on 34^th Street, and I will not watch any animated special urging me to celebrate the holiday season in Technicolor (that means no Grinch, no red-nosed reindeer, no Charlie Brown, and no grandma roadkill).

And an ex-girlfriend, when we were in college, used to mock Everything But the Girl’s Missing, especially the like the deserts miss the rain line, because, as she liked to say: How can a desert miss something it’s never had, since deserts are deserts because there is no rain. And I used to say, well, isn’t that the point?

If I were a banned book, I’d bring flowers to the grave of a mouse and I’d teach you that forever sometimes means forever and sometimes means less than forever but always means what forever will mean to you, then, at that moment.

Everyone who hears this part of my story wants to know what 72 hours in a psychiatric hospital is like. Even I, more than 16 months later, want to know what 72 hours in a psychiatric hospital is like, because I was and wasn’t the one who checked himself in at the end of a disastrous relationship.

“You don’t call enough, and don’t tell me that you don’t have time because I know your unlimited minutes cell phone plan makes calling me and your father that much easier. Call when you’re on the treadmill, or in line ordering your triple shot skim no-foam latte, or between job interviews.”

You become a morning person, or a night owl, or a combination of the two, if only to extend the time you get to spend with this person.

You want to know why I, a 34-year-old man, will follow Tori Amos around the world? Mostly because I enjoy her music, but also because my 18-year-old self who discovered Under the Pink in an aisle at Target in Ocala, Florida, would never have considered traveling the world to watch Tori perform songs, let alone travel to homes of men he (me, in this case) had never met.