When we all go to Memphis, we spread Ludington sand in Matt’s flower beds, like somebody died, and a silence falls as we let the sand sift through our fingers like ashes. It smells like Michigan, like seashells and ***** lake water, and it drowns out the construction workers making new-money houses.
Instead of funeral hymns, we’re blanketed by sawdust and cigarette smoke. We sip and savor Evan Williams and for once, none of us speaks.
Our veins light on fire from the whiskey, and our souls share a collective ache, like our bodies are made from some sort of symbiotic cell.
After The Spreading Of The Sand, we go to a haunted bar where entry is a password, where there’s a frown of a front door, and the exposed brick walls reek of the dead girls upstairs. I think, This is Memphis, a very loud city with louder secrets – the overpowering shadow spreading its fingers in all her corners, silent until she swallows you whole.
Memphis realigns your center –
a snap of the blues, a crack of whiskey and, all of a sudden, things run much more smoothly.
Memphis, she’s known as the City on the Bluff, a place where summer storms split at the river, don’t reconvene ‘til east of Arlington.
Her protection, it’s always there.
Like DNA shared among siblings, blood is always thicker here in her quarters.
Memphis, she tells me I should’ve kicked Worry to the curb all along.
Memphis, she keeps her people safe.