What Is To Come…Came

(see post from earlier tonight, below…yes, two in one night)

Under the porch light, beneath the stars, playing music with my friends,

the guitar strap snaps

and whips like a snake from around my neck.

And my red Art & Lutherie guitar, a guitar I have put ten years into, goes crashing down, face first, onto the hardwood porch at my feet.

The fiddler, everyone, they all stop playing.

Someone kicks over a beer and then nothing, silence.

And I stare fearfully for a swollen second at the guitar at my feet, afraid to turn it over.

I swear lightly under my breath, stunned, all the fires of hell exploding inside of me. “I’m cursed,” is all I can say with Big Slate holds me up steady so I don’t fall over, don’t throw the instrument, don’t plummet off the edge of the earth for lack of explanation. He was there, after all, when the Martin was hurt at the last party.

Tomorrow I will leave at 7am to drive around the southern tip of the Black Mountains, skirt around the base of Mt. Mitchell and enter the valley on the west slopes of the range. In a little over an hour I can get to the guitar expert – and I’m bring the Martin too. (Link goes to the story about the curse of the Martin, which was also damaged at a craft school party in a random accident.)

I can’t even stand to have the guitars in my house, like damaged souls, watching me, proof that either I lean too hard into life and this is how it hurts me back – or that nothing I do in life matters anyway, and this is what it looks like.

What was I wrote just a few hours ago? “With nothing but odd circumstances thrown my direction all day…Today I am but a pawn in the game…”