Diminished, Augmented, Altered

Major and minor, diminished and augmented, extended and altered; these are the names of chords, expressions of notes of music which, when played together, resonate in us and call up emotions, memories. Most chords are triads: three notes extended and enhanced by their shadow cousins. Music is sustenance to myth and belief, necessary for love and accompaniment to loss.

A girl once gave me a music box and told me to carry it with me always, because music is the soundtrack to the movie of our lives. She was a beautiful young woman, lithe and furtive, knowing and pensive. It was a time in my life when I found myself standing in a nexus of sounds and feelings, of hearts and highways. That music box, playing "Someone To Watch Over Me", became a theme to my theory, notes to my morning song. There began the idea that there are three women in my life at any given time, arrayed around me like a charm, a trinity of naiads, faeries and loreleis with their lilted songs playing out my desire and obsession as steps in their ringed dance.

There is always a woman who wants me, because I am her shade tree, her carpet of grass, her daily table and nightly pillow. She is kind and true, simple in her purity of thought and held fast by loyalty. I have made her mine by naming her, by spreading one arm and letting her head fall on my chest, her dreams mine in which to wander. She loves me and I try to love only her. But I am the hunter and the fields call me, the ocean laps at the edges of my mind, and I cannot stay. She is the one who I will always have but never want.

Singing her siren song to me is another woman, a fearsome binding of elements in the body of a pixie, a nymph with whirlpools and vortices of complication and passion in her eyes. She beckons me to be more, to sing, to pull away the carpet of what is supposed to be and thread new paths into a world that could be, if I would only believe. She spins and delights me, entrances and enthralls. I want her badly and she wants me quickly, but her eyes are quick, darting to other lost boys in the meadow, to capture them in her eternal rite of libation. But I am the hanged man, seeking my own destruction to give birth to something new, and I do not want to go, not yet.

Holding anchor to my tripartite circumscription is yet a third woman, one who is neither angel nor succubus, but who sings a haunting melody of safety and resolution. She is far above me and right behind me, saturating my dream-life with secret words in some immortal, beguiling tongue. She stands before the morning sun and becomes the light, retreats into the sky and becomes my warmth, my unreachable destination. She does not want me so much as she wants me to become that thing only she can touch inside me, to grow beyond being into a constant place of becoming. I cannot want her and she cannot want me, yet I can want nothing else, having divined the rhyme to her runic refrain. I am the fool and I am lost.

There is an idea that, by saying that something is we have captured it and constrained it to be only that thing. By saying someone is, in relation to ourselves, we have made them only that one thing, disallowed them from being more. My idea waxes and wanes, the three women who hold me shift and sway in soft focus and I see their faces change, the redolence of their fragrances become a melange of illusion and fancy. I am in between and carried, elated and depleted.

I do not want to capture someone, to change her; I do not want to be changed. I want to be anywhere else but here and I want to be with her, wherever she is. These are the contradictions that feed my music box with its looping themes, the accompaniment to my filmic memoir. It may be that there is one who is all, but I have no more hope of guiding my story into hers than the hope of rowing my ship across the ocean to meet one pristine, penultimate wave.