I Will Still Love You

— John Milton Bunch

While doomscrolling Twitter one day (always inadvisable), I happened upon a tweet most foul from Cherie Currie, former lead singer of the Runaways and star of my teenage bedroom wall. Cherie had become a Trump supporter, you see, and with deference to those readers who may share with her this contemporary retreat from reason, for me the revelation carried the weight of abomination; and of carcinogenic, mutated nostalgia, and of anxious depression bumrushing the golden light.

Cherie, I replied, please say this isn’t real.

Tweeting back, she called me by name, thus twisting the knife harder, and said it was very, very real.

Fifty years later and I’m still devoted to you, I said, with a shrinking, frail and damaged heart.

Well, you might have to cut me loose, she said.

I responded no, I’ll live with the pain. And I have.

Turns out you can click your heels all you want but you’re never going home. It’s a hungry thing with a painful bite, and it gives you no choice but to tolerate its hard emotional accretion and your own worsening limp. Keep walking along the thickening wall, peering through its shrinking cracks at a past of shadows behind a fire, until your feet sink into the mud and you stop, calcified and still, hoping to remember, but nonetheless happy that you can’t.

John Milton Bunch spent several decades studying the psychology of learning, writing courseware, delivering corporate training and consulting in computer science and data analytics. Now he writes on things he finds interesting, including political philosophy.