a Kingdom among

the stars,

a tale as old

as time,

a destined meeting

across the galaxy,

a soul-bond

created from cosmic dust,

a waltz on

the face of a cratered

silver moon,

a melody composed

and strummed

on the rings of Saturn,

spilled ink

tattooed on the soul

…and in Divine timing

they couldn’t escape the

collision

that would eventually

cause a vein in the heart

to echo a familiar

beat.

If you get to spend your life with your soulmate, you are devastatingly lucky.

Meeting them is hard enough, but dating them and marrying them statistically is next to impossible. 7 billion people. One of you, and one of them.

Sadly, no, one of the saddest things is that,

People settle for comfort.

They settle for money, for stability, for family approval.

And while I’m not saying that’s bad,

How can you live your life without ever finding out the big what if? Perhaps I'm overly naive or hopeful, yet I wonder. Can you be content? Can you stand to spend your life with someone else? And leave your soulmate to someone else?

I’d rather be living paycheck to paycheck in a raggedy apartment if it meant I could dance in the rain with my soulmate, watch old movies and think ordering chinese food is a treat. I know with capitalism and the way the world works, it’s not that easy. It's not that clean-cut. But love isn’t either. Love is incredibly complicated.

We all burn brightly, but only for a glimpse in history. Wouldn't it be a shame if we never tried to find the person we were meant for? Never tried to make it work? I’d rather give my life to the what if, then spend all of my life wondering about it.

We never spoke of marriage, nor even of love. In my time under her roof there were many passionate, but few tender words spoken between us, and no romantic ones. It is strange to say, but I cannot remember if I chose Coradelle, or if she chose me. My travels brought me here as if drawn by a magnet, and I stayed because it was a good place for me. I can say that I have been happy, that it was she who made me that way, and I know that in some ways I have made her happy, too.

Our affair seemed to be the result of some great binge of Destiny’s brewing. A man who is disposed to drink, and a woman with a whiskey still cooking a sweet, clean, mule kicking spirit. Lucky is the man who finds his muse, and rare is the woman who feeds him his addiction, who cooks up his elixir, pours it into his cup, and watches happily as he sips away his health, and sobriety.

What Darlin’ Corey called home was merely a shack on the canebrake. To the north and west was brackish marshland, to the south and east greasy-grass dunes which held back the bay’s waters. Farther beyond the swamps to the north were my wife, and children. Corey’s was a hidden place. It would be lonely as well, but for the slow drip of smugglers who ply their way here for the whiskey, for the money, and with eyes for the woman, as flies come to honey. I was one of those flies myself, and many another would have happily stood in my shoes.

Few would call Coradelle beautiful, though she was certainly not hard to look at. She was tall for a woman, and slender, but she wore a tightness around her mouth and eyes which cast her in a serious, almost angry light. That light gleamed too with a cunning that bred caution into a man, that and the pistol she wore buckled low to her hip as a man wears his, only hers set on the outside of a skirt, rather than trousers. Below the dress and pistol were a man’s boots, and on her head a black, felt planter’s hat, the hat also of a man’s design. Tucked up under the hat was a bun tied from black, wavy curls that few men were privy to see, and fewer still to feel tickling his face and chest as she writhed atop him in the shack’s darkness... but that is another story.

I had not meant to stay, but her whiskey still made easy money, and easy money made for easy, misty-minded days which passed quickly into foggy weeks, and months. She lived well, Coradelle did, making enough to sell, and selling enough to drink. I was only a leech clinging for life blood, but once found that is hard to let go of. Through hot days we lounged on a shaded porch, or swam in the warm, clear waters of those sandy, outer banks. It was a life too good to last, and so it did not.

Winter brought the change. A cold fog lay thick about the warmer, watery sloughs on the morning when the revenuers came. They appeared from out the fog-shadows like stick figure phantoms holding shadow shotguns and stick pistols before them. I rushed from the barn in time to see Cora step from the cabin, her head pushed forward to see through the mist. I watched as she placed her banjo on the porch steps and drew the pistol from her belt. It was fifty long yards from the barn where I had been tending the still’s fire to the shack. I would not make it. I blew hard breaths, running on legs still soft from last night’s whiskey. From my eye’s corner the shadow shotguns and the stick pistols of the revenuers blossomed red, real enough flame into the gray, colorless morning. The shots rang sharp, and harsh before quitting and quieting as sharply as they had begun, leaving naught but stillness in their wake.

I lifted Corey from the porch, carrying her light frame easily through the shotgun shanty, and out the back. One of her bare feet knocked the oil lamp over as I hurried out the door, and into the swamp. We were not followed.

I carried my Coradelle to a high meadow soft with grass, a meadow far from any danger of floodwaters, a meadow sober, lonely, and sad. Longing for a jug, my shaking hands dug her hole deep, and laid her down low. Tears salted the peat I blanketed her with, and in. Far to the east raised a black smoke. Every physical trace of Coradelle would soon be vanished as though she had never existed, but I was to find that there was not enough whiskey to erase the traces of her that would live forever in my mind.

I could remember no proper prayers, nor a fitting song, so my shaking hands smoothed the soil to a nice, round shape.

I whispered the words, “I love you“ to a pile of dirt and hoped, for it was the first and last time my darling Coradelle might hear them from my lips.

Those wife and children waited to the north, so I started westward.

(Inspired by an old bluegrass song that I love. Don’t know who wrote it, but Lester and Earl did a great version)