Perhaps, Maybe

I had to retrace the path that led me to the moment in which I was.

I put the record “Busted Jukebox” by Shovels & Rope upon the turntable and set the needle to a certain song. I made myself some coffee and sat there beneath the last sliver of morning light.

I watched the rest of a long-winded grey Wednesday passover outside my window.

It was a mid March Wednesday that would be rained out due to a tranquility that made it seem that everything would soon be crystal clear.

Tennessee Williams once wrote: “So much for the past and present. The future is maybe called ‘perhaps’, which is the only thing to call the future.”

Though, I must look back on the journey before I can move forward. I can only see in terms of a nebulous perhaps. But all I can perceive in this moment I call the present, and even this moment is nothing more than what passes through my mind.

The clouds scurry across a late afternoon moon like a flocking squadron of B-52’s, the thicket of a wilderness to the west sits on the fog like a fish-shaped paperweight, the stars seem to be reborn, one by one, like little glimmers of hope scattered about here and there…anyways, you get the idea.

Furthermore, my thoughts were now attuned to the sights and sounds of a world I had yet to see to a splendid degree.

It was as if a veil had been stripped away.

I could hear things taking place miles away from where I stood: the hooting song of a night owl, people slamming their windows shut, others talking of love, and even a children’s pickup baseball game.

“What a relief,” I thought to myself.

LETTING GO OF ME

The hum of a metaphoric mental machine had vanished from me. Ditto to the thoughts left with only one place left to go.

Perhaps there would be no fireworks displayed today in the fashion of a grand finale in the far off distance.

From now on, I vowed to myself, when my mind was exhausted, my sword seemingly broken, and the chinks in my armor rusted, I would lay myself down upon a meadow of worn out carpet and listen to the wind of my soul and allow it take me wherever I am meant to go.

And I would follow that path, as I should follow it to where it took me, whether that be down into the goodness left within me, or quite possibly further into the depths of insanity’s quarantine.

But either way, my heart and soul would find its way to where it was meant to be, most likely perched somewhere along my sleeve.

Now I know, this brief prelude to the point of this story, will perhaps, seem trivial to some of you, for there is no greater circumstance of triviality when dancing through the grey area of one’s imagination.

But enough thinking. Enough of it altogether.

Instead I remember, perhaps, as to why I ever thought I was able to write.

THE FIRST INKLING

The field was just as I remembered, the same shaved ice lime green, delicately mowed against the opposite pattern of a wilderness evergreen, when which the two were combined, they spoke astoundingly of Spring.

The sunshine was as crisp as I can remember, as I can almost feel its blaze against my skin, it was quite hot and humid for a mid April day.

I poured some peanuts into my coca-cola and stood for the national anthem.

The gentle, naked wind spoke soundlessly, as if it were swinging an invisible shaft of light through the dark wheelhouse of my soul.

But why was my mind racing through the darkness?

Was it to allow the light an opportunity to keep up with my fast paced imagination?

Perhaps, maybe. But this was when the dream was a dream without my own applied substance.

So here I find myself between two glorious places both at once, between a memory and my reality, both on their way to a long lost dream.

A LONG LOST MEMORY

It was a sunny spring day in April 1998, almost twenty-three years, less one month, to the day.

I was in attendance of an Atlanta Braves baseball game at Turner Field in Atlanta, Georgia. You know the one, the one in which they built haphazardly for the 1996 Olympics.

It was no long haul from where I spent my adolescence growing up, a hundred and eleven miles to be exact.

The game was against the Chicago Cubs, first pitch 2:22 PM.

I was diehard Braves fan back then—still am—though not as rabid about the outcome of the season as I once was. It is just a game after all, much like the creativity of writing has come to be.

But every so often, my buddy and I would drive the quick little gauntlet into Atlanta to take in the sights and sounds of a game nurtured in the womb of the American Dream.

A game that gently spoke to the spirit of both mine, and America’s personality.

Back then the Braves were a perennial powerhouse, year in and year out, with a pitching trifecta unlike any the game has still yet to see. This being, in the author’s opinion at least.

It was the rubber match of a three game series, Greg Maddux was pitted against Kerry Wood.

It was a pitching matchup for the ages.

So I sat back, pounded my southern boy snack of peanuts soaked in coke, and stretched out my soul with what I still consider the most refreshing beer I have ever had the pleasure of tasting.

The stadium slowly filled up with the leisurely approach of a Sunday afternoon, but I could hear nothing but the sound of the game slowly warming up, the leather being whipped around, the crack of wooden bats bouncing around in echoes around the ballpark.

Everything reminded me so much of my childhood, that I did, I felt like a kid again. It all touched my soul in a way I had never known my soul could be touched.

That was when it happened.

I began to notice the sky sparkling with deeper and different shades of blue, the draft beer was colder than cold ever thought it could be, the ball so strikingly white, outlined with little red threaded curvatures that spun in the shape of a heart if seen in the right angle of light.

Everything was so vibrant amongst the canvassed green of Spring.

It was unlike anything I had ever seen.

Then up to the plate stepped Andruw Jones, a young newcomer who had first showed up on the scene a few years prior.

The kid was a six-tooled phenom who took the league by storm in the ’96 World Series against the Yankees.

After Wood had already pitched nine straight fastballs in a 1-2-3 inning in the second half of the first frame, up came Jones to leadoff the second half of the second frame.

On his first pitch, the entire stadium knew what was coming, and so did Jones, as he sent a high fastball into the bowels of the left field bleachers, for what would be the Braves only run of the game. It was a towering solo shot that the entire state of Georgia knew was gone the second it made contact with the bat.

That satisfying crack when the bat met the ball resounded through the stadium, just as well as myself, that one Sunday afternoon. I can still hear that sound even now, in this precise moment, so many years later.

As the peanut gallery leapt with jubilation, and the roar of applause echoed around me, I spilled half of the best tasting beer I have ever known due to the excitement that poured into parts of me, that I still question even exist. Yet to this day, I consider it the best twelve bucks I’ve ever spent, as it is the most memorable beer of my life.

In that simple instant, for absolutely no reason at all, and not based on any grounds whatsoever, it struck me unlike anything ever had.

I thought, perhaps maybe I could write after all.

BACK TO REALITY

As I lay here now, I can almost recall the exact sensation I felt that day.

It felt as if something, like an angel disguised as a little white baseball came down like a gift from Heaven with fluttering red wings, only to fall cleanly into my hands. Minus half a beer mind you;)

But I had no idea until that day, that chance could fall into one’s grasp so easily, but that day it did.

I didn’t know then, the metaphysical power of chance, and perhaps I still don’t and never will.

But whatever it was, it took place for reasons I have still yet to fathom twenty-three years later.

Maybe it was a revelation, or perhaps, the word epiphany might be better suited for said situation.

All I can say for sure is that something changed who I was that day in ways so dramatic, that my perception of life was permanently altered in an instant—when Andrew Jones belted that beautiful, soul-cracking homer into my hands that one flawless April day.

The Braves won that day due to Maddux tossing a gem of an 88-pitch shutout.

As we were getting up to head for the exit, a blooming patch of fireworks burst onto the scene in the pattern of a perfect day amongst the backdrop of a late afternoon twilight.

As my buddy and I headed back to Alabama through sheets of driving rain, and when I found my way home sometime later, I promptly grabbed my dusty old notebook and a fountain pen that I had neglected throughout high school for many reasons. Though my rebellious ways, being the main one.

Smartphones weren’t a thing way back then, and the computer was probably taken, which meant the ink had to be spilled from a pen, each character, each word, each smile, each thought, had to creatively spill from the depths of my soul.

The sensation of creating washed over me, writing felt so very fresh, as I saw everything that surrounded me, so vibrant and so new.

From then on I knew. I knew I would never be the same ignorant kid I was.

I knew that each day I would have to write something, anything, whatever it was, it did not matter.

So I sat and I wrote. Then I wrote some more. I wrote whenever I was free, perhaps in order to escape from the reality of me, to feel free of myself.

Over the next few months that followed I wrote practically and frantically about everything I could and could not see.

But then.

Along came a girl.

One in whose light, I saw things that went way deeper and brighter than me.

Things a boy like me should’ve never been supposed to see.

I was like a deer caught in the headlights of love, something even more mesmerizing than just writing.

I saw poetry.

And the rest they say, is history.

CLEANING IT UP

While gathering up my mental mess, I venture from a memory back towards reality, it was only natural that I wasn’t able to produce anything good back then, and perhaps this is still true to this day.

Perhaps, I was mistaken to assume that someone like me who had never written a damn thing in his life could spin the pitch of something so beautiful right off the bat into the bleachers of his wildest dreams.

And I, much to a fault, have always been stubborn enough to swing or the fences no matter the scenario, as long as it's real.

And perhaps I am still swinging too hard.

But then comes the Voice again, the one in which, since that day in 1998 has led this pen. And this is what it said.

Let go of trying to write with such sophistication, forget about all the little self-imposed spiritually prescribed ideas that meander through your mind on a minute by minute basis, as they will only force your thoughts into something they are not.

Write down your feelings and thoughts as they come to you, freely and not forced, and in the ways you remember how real happiness really felt, and the things you like, that you love, and especially remember those moments that touched your soul when you were exactly in the place that you were meant to be.

And so I wonder, as I rise from the chair in which I've somewhat wrote off this lazy Wednesday afternoon.

Could I rise with the winds of my soul, above all the parasitic thoughts, the accidental rhymes and phrases of so-called follow through, the mistakes of my misjudgment, the mere phenomena of my own poetic touch, the sometimes wasted and randomly human words that spill all over my writing, and finally be fit to find my own little piece of Heaven on earth?

Or would I, could I, perhaps, hit the walk off home run that my wildest dreams have long been made of?

In the end, who really knows?

But perhaps, maybe.

—Ryan Love