Reading Salvial_Ten's journal

I got bored, I started writing. So um, with no further ado, something a made up in the wee hours of the morning that people I've shown it to seem to enjoy.

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There was so much wine. Really. Red. Blush. White. You name it. Even the expensive sparkling variety…how could I not have drank it? But well, that isn’t the point of this tail. I remember the wine. I remember it more than anything. Flowing freely and the gayety it inspired and the smile on my mothers face as father spun her around and around. I remember my first. I had caught a bottle as it rolled from the table and grandfather looked at me and said, “Vee, it’s yours. Enjoy it!” So I did. There was not but an eighth of it left but I was ten and it was wonderful and intoxicating.

Second to the wine I remember the music. There was so very much of it. It was utterly impossible to keep up with who played what and who it was that even knew the proper way to coax music from strings and horns and drums. No body could read sheet music or really much of anything else. I think they like to call it functional illiteracy now. My older brother used to be a deity as he sat before the piano, playing and laughing and drinking his wine. Mother was always so much more proud of him than me. I couldn’t play an instrument to save my life, let alone earn coin. But I could sing. And we needed voices here.

But with the music and the wine came travel and it is what I truly loved. The wine was my addiction and the music was my affliction but the road was my home, my lover, my very reason to breathe. There were many roads to go down. I preferred the ones that were splitting and barely stripped. That lead to little town so far away that nothing seemed to exist outside of it. Those pocket universes were what inspired my singing to my divine brother’s playing. It mattered not that his song and my tune were foreign to one another, impromptu. The crowds we sang and played and danced for could never get enough of it.

So then it all fell apart. They started to shun our kind across Europe and then America. Its like in the great war of culture and politics that there was not an inch of room for our minority. This had happened before though, back when we were all just Gypsies and again as Romanians and now? Well, I think they call us hobos, vagrants, and any number of foul things. The rich get to be called the circus and people pay to see them in their sequins and high topped tents. Our family split ways after long nights of bitter arguments and the music and wine stopped. My brother and I left together. My parents took our younger siblings—twins. And the cousins and grand parents all took off to who knows where.

The wine and music kept going for Jeremy and I. But he died. It wasn’t the wine, it wasn’t the music or the seedy bars that we put our act on for. He’d caught a cold. It turned into pneumonia. His lungs turned into water. He died coughing and burning with fever in my arms, in a shitty bathroom in a shitty truck stop in a shitty town in a shitty state in a shitty country. He died in shit. I was his lover, his friend, his cohort. He was my lover, my inspiration, and the music to songs that no one remembered. The world is a worse place without him.

I travel on. Or I did. My last stop is this city on a river at the edge of a gulf and its recovering from the wrath of nature. I wasn’t here then, I was a little too far north, in a city that those people were fleeing too. We’d been heading for that Crescent. I’d like to believe that nature avenged my brother’s death; though why on that poor place I don’t know. I don’t care either. I sing in lounges now. To whatever music they afford me. Karaoke has put food in my belly on more than one night. Selling my other wares has done it more nights than that. Though, I have to say that there is still wine. I might as well say that it is my blood now.

I’m slowly poisoning myself with my fondest memory. A poet’s death I’ve been told is slow and consuming. But I, am not a poet. I’ve tried to be and the words flow like bile from an infected wound. Certainly not beautiful, and certainly not worthy of a poet’s death. I wonder how my family fairs. I wonder what started the fighting. Probably money. There has never been much of that.

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--Jami

You fail it.