Pennies.

Do you believe in life after love? 

What started as a metallic purple lyric from that one song by that one chick, has now become the question of the hour.

Cher’ing is caring.

Do you believe in life after love?

Wishes like candy grow up tall in the lawn next door. Enticing. I pluck and purse my lips. As the breath bloats my cheeks, the wishes bounce off the walls of my cranium and cavity. Like a bubble gum ball, the breath pops out, and with it a wish, scattering the dandies of this lion about the globe.

Which wish did I wish, you’ll never know.

Are wishes just hopes and are hopes just wishes? Fin swishing fishes in this river of reminiscence. I can wish I may and I can wish I might, but what is wishing but a hopeless flight. A flight to never Neverland with a pocket full of thimbles.  A mouthful of kisses just waiting to be used, but instead just abused as they spill and diffuse.

Bait the line. It’s time. Time to catch these wishes like the slimy little fishes they are. For wishes are silly like sloppy wet kisses, slapping the deck as they breathe their last breath. The death of the breath proves wishing is what?

Wishes break and wishes extinguish. Think about the bones and the candles. The empty stems and fallen stars.

There is no hope in wishing.

And so I sit fishing.

A little girl stands at the end of the pier. She is wearing a white dress with a red satin bow. Her long blonde hair splashes over her shoulders. The waves crash against the wooden pillars with the barnacles. She peers into the water. She is looking for something. She stands there all day. At the end of the pier. Looking for something.

She returns day after day. Weeks. Months. Years go by.

A young woman now stands at the end of the pier. She is wearing a dress of deep scarlet. Her long blonde hair drips down her back. The soggy mascara carves wakes down her cheeks. Clutched in her fist is an empty pile of wet sand.

For years she had cast lines with her eyes. For years she caught nothing.

Then one day amidst the many, she cast off.

Her lithe body became the baited lure. Her cupped hand the hook. Fishing for wishes of things unseen. Her breath can’t save her now, for wishing is missing the point. Sifting through the sand on the ocean floor, her hook catches nothing but empty promises. Grains of weathered matter that were once a part of something bigger.

The crown of her head breaks the water as she gasps for breath. She’d been toiling down there for too long. With the breath that breaks the water, all wishes are gone.

There is no time for wishing or dreaming or even daring to dwell in the land of future.

She stands on the pier still. Puddles forming around her soggy pale feet. As the water drips off her fingertips, her eyes catch a glimpse of perfection. No longer casting lines with eyes into the water, wishing for moments of yore to return unblemished. But instead eyes sit on the horizon, a perfect line where earth and sky meet magically. Where all that is, holds hands with all that is to come.

Here and now, on this weathered wood, stands a princess. Her locks of love drip into the splinters. Seeping through and settling. She has finally learned that wishing on stars and cakes, throwing pennies in tiny lakes called fountains, wishing is like moving mountains. Wishing. Take all your wishbones and dandelions. Take every minute of 11:11 for the rest of this world’s existence. Take all your self-proclaimed genies and their wretched little lamps.

For wishing is like fishing with your bare hands. Only sand remains when all is said and done. None won.

It’s just for fun.

A young boy gets a trumpet for his birthday.

Every day for years he is forced to toot his own horn. With each song, a tune, and with each tune a loon collects in his bin of decay. Until one day, he is crazy, a loony tune to the darkest degree.

Neuroses abound, trickling down. Addiction wreaks havoc in our wishing wells of desire. We are groveling at the bottom. Fishing for wishes come true. Sand collects under our fingernails as we scratch our way out of these wishes found false.

Melodies of maladies riddle our breathless carcasses. We’ve succumbed to expiration as we wish ourselves to death. Blowing out all the breath with every broken wish.

Purse your lips and bat your eyes, no matter how hard you blow, your wish will never become surprise, because wishes are lies metastasized.

And so I ask, do you believe in life after love?

For to wish for true love is a beacon of demise. So if love is true and arrives without wishing, when it swims away, do you continue fishing?

Love has come and gone. And yes it existed. And so I stand on this pier, tight-fisted tat wristed. Without hesitation, I scream with delight, for although wishing is flight without hope, hope is flight in itself, and so I cling tight to this string. A string is a thing, a tangible thing. I take flight with this kite that flies me to the moon. The cat’s playing the fiddle and yeah, the dish ran away with the spoon. It’s only noon. I no longer croon to the loony tunes of the man whose love expired.

I float through the sky like a butterfly, but I sting like a bee now so beware. For love when lost leaves branches bare and brazen. A broken heart breeds consequence. Lessons learned are pieces pasted back together.

The answer is yes. I do believe in life after love. For to continue wishing for what’s been lost, is to Cher in haggard harmony.