Σ
When I look through tragic things like papers, photographs, and the other corpses we retain like twisted, masochistic, little pack rats, I tend to conclude that I must have grown up on a Delta 757: Atlanta to Detroit. In a back row bathroom-stink seat, I learned about a thing that I could only place as life’s persistent sorrow, only joy, and sole consistency. I was 10 and I cried a lot to my mommy. Some time later (and like the little moron I was), I learned to call this “transience” which was notably more vague. Not to embellish anything to the magnitude of holiness, but today was another day…
and, in all probability, tomorrow will be also. Tonight I write a dirge with four, hasty, angular strokes --- the first, careless, experimental lines made by a preschooler defiling a stark-white tabletop, red crayon in fist (or those of other loosely equivalent acts of creation and deprecation). What I mean is, I draw sigma for the children of the exhausted mantras: this is an ode to the fabric of things when the ceremonies conclude and all of the great symbols decompose on the kitchen counters. Writing this will necessarily be a most paradoxical undertaking, but I have become well accustomed to duality.
Here are the things that don’t belong to me:
7 Window Ledges
139 Subway Sandwiches
5 Wasp Stings
3 Ruined Shirts
944 Cans of Diet Coke with Lemon
56 Rented Movies
40 Tea Candles
A Few Million Heart Beats
1 Trashed Oven
19 Street Lamps
3 Swimming Pools
194 Burned Logs
308 Plates of Nip N Tuck
40 Tough Fights
1.5 oz Nutmeg
4 People Who Just Clicked
8 Football Games
3 Garden Hoses
All the inverted spectre-sights of summer nights and other things that never were as well
and peace of mind that’s known to men who take of the Great Morel!
What’s left for me to tell you about what might have been yesterday? A great many things tend to come full circle if one is sufficiently patient. I know. I have screamed and cried and carried on like a toddler, and heard the wheel groan on its rotary axis as if it might actually respond sympathetically. I’ve seen times long forgotten by the sieve return in the strangest of places to run together with others as they never did before…like poetic compilation. I wish I had another 6 years to watch this happen over and over and over again. I don’t. But still, I opened the same black gate with a shivering arm. I walked to my car and I saw others turn on their headlights, start their motors, and pull away. I used to roll my pants and unbutton my shirt when I jumped off the diving board. A girl said I looked better, then, with short hair, but I think the cold always had the same bite (it stung like the passions of life!). I always emerged dripping to sit in the green and gold where the crickets and cicadas sang: to find an empty chair and someone’s arms while the crickets and cicadas sang. I’d look upon the same smiles on the same faces and hear conversations so much like those of years past that I really think what we actually do is go out and play some games and then come back to the gazebo by the pool to join back in on the conversation that started an eon ago. I do not think it will last an eon longer; one night I will open and close the gate for good. I may wear a blue button-down shirt that clings to my body with pungent water. I may mount a bicycle and whisk home through the thick night, painted yellow-orange. Or I may walk and remember walks when I was much colder and much drier. But it is most likely that it will not happen that way.
Sometimes we need to write a function as an infinite sum:
6 Perfect Semesters
A million Dollars in Gas
170 Park Concerts
∞ Instantaneous Frames
26 Pictures on My Wall
1,783 Cups of Coffee
6 “Projects”
63 Faded Scars
1 Tin of Butter Cookies
40 Xantac Pills
9 Midnight Movies
3 People Loved
1 Empty Fortune Cookie
4 Alcohol Binges
2,633 Problems Solved
3 Serious Anxiety Attacks
4 Pocket Knives
2 Christmas Trees
We call it “transcendental.” Allegedly, it’s supposed to converge onto reality, when we consider a sum of terms to no end. “You were worried about the ends of things…”
“Yes, and I am. I really do love [her].”
“You know I’ve always worried…”
“I know. You were there before all of us in a lot of ways. And you just admitted you were scared.”
There’s nothing left for me to tell you about anything that might have been yesterday. I’m saying “you” freely now because I know that there must be a “you” or otherwise I would not be doing this. It doesn’t even hurt me to remind myself of that anymore, though once it was the most profound of all insults. You know you could do anything in the world to me and I couldn’t stay mad at you. So not the point of this paragraph. What I meant to say was that when it comes down to it, what has this been but more of the same life? All the sort of music that seems made up of night smells, and the occlusions of the ages that flash red-brown before half-mast eyes…that’s all they are. That’s what all of the memories and all of the sobbing ceremonies have been made of; why every moment that I expected to be just a little bit more than a moment --- the way I liked to remember things --- seemed to come up short.
“As much as you say there aren’t instants, you can’t think that all we perceive is the past. There is a present, you know, in fact. That’s all there is.”
“I’ll believe you when I can see you in two places at once.”
“Meh. They can make photons do that now.”
“Photons don’t count; they travel at the speed of light so it is imperative that they have zero mass. It would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate…”
My train of thought trailed off. Somehow it didn’t really matter right then, for the same reason that so many different things that seemed to contradict each other could coexist and possess simultaneous and self-same truth. People think they have reasons to disagree when all they really do is say the same thing with opposite words. Even wars are started over the most ridiculous and meaningless things.
Like:
2 Rusty Bicycles
7 dL Blood
9 Broken Water Guns
39 Minor Anxiety Attacks
1,000 Missed Opportunities
0 Regrets
311 Half-hearted punches
427 Sedative Tablets
4 Full Notebooks
A million Tears
6 Infected Piercings
2 Basements
308 Exams
1 Demon
200 Sunsets
644 Hot Dogs
79 Long Walks
terminating in drowsy, flickering half-light by which we die for a while in each other’s arms.
“No mulberries yet.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
How careless time is to make a bright afternoon in July and a dark, lonely house the same color! But I have shared a hazy, lingering melancholy far sweeter and more touching than happiness either way: the kind that gets in the eyes and shrouds the world like an opiate mask. I have ridden swings as high as any child in familiar playgrounds and taken hands out in the sunshine. I have seen the golden pulse light the shady houses through dusty windows and gaping front doors, and dance on the flooded yard that holds us, ankle deep. And so, have I seen it light the blood-warm summer rain while we spin around each other so blissfully alone while the mushroom cloud rises in the south. I learned how tightly I’d have to hold on so that you wouldn’t be torn away from me to fall lifeless in the grass, and I learned that I couldn’t amid the usual fit of laughter and tears that make us so much closer every time. I don’t even get tired of trying to believe in it --- I am sufficiently determined to keep us safe from the tides of the land should all else fall apart around us. That, we are used to anyway, over bitter hot tea, rain-soaked pajama pants, and unwashed faces that endlessly exchange broken gazes.
Oh, hello Michael! And aren’t you looking post-apocalyptic this evening?
We used to say “no more.” Now we sob over inevitabilities, mostly.
“I think that’s why we went there to collect ourselves. I think part of me thought that if I went back again it would be June, and you would be next to me. There would be children playing and mulberries to eat. There weren’t. There were only trucks hauling things into the Norup fields, and they had cut down the mulberry tree. The world was in my face again when I got home. Everything was real and sharp...like how I see it when I wear corrective lenses. I sat back down for an internet chat. And then the lights flickered...”
The world changed again with the set of the sun, and I wished I would never have to look at it in any other way again. Music, laughter, myriad stars, and the smoke of bonfires filled the thick, untainted night like they always do at the place I go in my dreams. I laid awake for a long time with tears in my eyes over the thought of doing any of this without you.
Of Places and Things Are Treacherous Companions Made:
44 Passing Trains
3 Coffee Shops
37 Essays
1 Living human body
3 Identities
1 Royal Oak City
20 Manila Folders
3 Pairs of Sunglasses
2 Computer Keyboards
26 Sticks of Incense
2 Valve Keys
11 Lawns Cut
31 Novels
18 Empty Bottles
3 Gasoline Engines
2 Shopping Carts
31 Dead Animals
2 Failures
I think. But walk with me anyway in the cool ravine where time ends.
And listen to the winds. (And rainfall.)
I went looking for ghosts the first time, but that’s usually how things go. It stands to reason that I found shadows and whistling wind; torrential rain and mud pits, but true phantoms have appeared only in other things: coffee cups, and such. Interchangeable cheap hotels. As I write, the pile of books at the foot of my bed has this quality and reminds me that I carried it up along with a styrofoam cup. I felt as though we were drawn to the room like very old friends keeping an ancient pact to meet again at a specific time and specific place. Whether the pact had ever been stated explicitly or whether it had simply grown out of everyone’s heart and then come true, none could really remember. But that’s how perfectly in place I felt…as though our commonality embedded in the fabric of that room had drawn us there on long tangled tendrils…
(This is an ode to all Quintessential Cheshire Cats and anyone else who has walked with me through walls of solid cinder block (or on the surface of a green-tinted lakes dotted with leafy islands). And, this is an apology to all holders of macrocosmic puzzle pieces that mine was missing for those hours between 11 and 1 at night in the dead of the Michigan winter. I felt a ghost-kiss, and I walked down to the lobby in my swimsuit past the free coffee machine. The lady working at the desk simply told me that the hotel did not have a swimming pool. Which was imperative…) The world is beautiful and fascinating, so we’ll learn, love, and have fun. Otherwise, perhaps, some things must be done differently. I have celebrated for seventeen and a half years; everyone needs some kind of an excuse…
And after so long, it’s a small miracle I remembered to park my bike under the pine tree.
People who don’t like to cry should throw away things that have burned up or burned out.
99 Photographs
1 Wallet
19 CDs
1 Stomach Ulcer
A million heart beats
1 Black Out
27 lb Dust in My Socks
704 Bugs
5 bags Salty Licorice
2 Cellular Phones
5 Science Competitions
2 Sunrises
I cry. And I love the way you make me feel like my world is going to end.
Really, I only left my bike there because my tube blew out. I had to go around on foot and look for the other lonely ones with bicycles and sad and searching eyes. My mom pointed out how few of the “old parents” still bothered to come to the concerts --- the old men and women who were the mothers and fathers of the children my age. She asked me what it’s like to grow up in a place (she never had that opportunity). I told her that it hurts. It’s like seeing the same people and the same places in a lot of different ways, as through a lot of different kinds of glass varying in index of refraction. When you look upon someone or something, you don’t just see it as it is in the present. You see it as it is now and every other way it ever has been. No matter which version you choose to look at, the thing is obscured…blurred by too many images and ideas and emotions radiating from it all at once.
And what when they play the Halcyon for us?
For when I look at them, we’re there sometimes instead:
Posed as newlywed
[in gowns;
this is a sacred moment, I know].
And most of those things must have ended right around the time I threw away the valve key I used to open the spigot below the drinking fountain: when I knew I couldn’t need it any more. And ah! This has been no great funeral (though we’re so old and weathered, I don’t doubt we’re on the edge of death)! But it was only the same park where I played with water guns when I was ten. The same loves and the same quarrels. The same sounds and scents on the air. The same permeating truth and eternal lie that give us every moment to belong to us for no time at all (as we may expect from the duality of our benefactor). I came looking for a casket and an elegy. But this has been the moment of life and death and nothing at all because I didn’t really realize anything I didn’t know and none of this has meant anything but LIVING BREATHING PASSION!
I slipped out through the garage into an autumnal evening: dry leaves rustled under bare feet and smoke and fiddle music and cries of gaiety hung on the heavy air. These, I would have loved more had I not been running --- compelled forward through gelatin air by an anxiety so profound that any attempt to rationalize it as a form of mortal terror must have been one made in self-comfort. White pin pricks pulsed above in the hot brown sky, as the tessellated waxing moon and the musculature of my frantic body. Sticks went into my soles and snapped painfully.
You sat in lawn chairs and we barely touched, but with dark, sympathetic eyes. I used to think your broken gaze icy, but tonight only you knew me. Would your arms be any warmer? [I’m too warm and my tie’s too tight.] And all I can think about is {} who probably loves some faceless boy named {}. [This is a sacred moment, I know.]
I ran past a great stone church; a grave yard; cheap motels; unique restaurants. My skin was fair then, and my hair was short and well-kept. My eyes retained their green with more fiery youth than fierce exhaustion. They dared deviate from the seemingly preset course of their bearer to identify his pursuers:
17 ½ Years of Youth
It was another boy that pursued: a tall and confident-looking boy with box-framed glasses. He jingled handcuffs. A girl was at his side: a beautiful, rainbow-eyed girl with box-framed glasses. She called my name and I hid from them in a café that doesn’t exist. Or I ran into the Children’s City to take refuge in the theatre that no one visits, from all but the short, black-haired youth who rode the escalator with shorts and no shoes. He told me that I, too, could take off my shoes…they’d probably still let me in. We’d have stayed there and spoken for hours before bicycling away in opposite directions, except I’m actually a few miles north of there now, and a lot of people in the back seat of my little, black car are shouting, “MIIIIKE! TUUUURRRRRN!!!” Where was I then? Right…the first time, we went looking for ghosts…
My tires screeched as I made that turn but, at last, gripped the dirt road and set us in forward motion. At length, we passed over a modest-looking cement bridge. We parked the car a couple blocks away and got out to walk back.
We must have discussed this all more than I care to delineate right now, and I must have worried a lot more than retelling this makes me worry. But mostly, I remember us finding a dirt path which led away from the road and up a steep incline for a few yards. This, we scaled in a few strides, and looked over the edge of a shallow ravine to discover that the seemingly-mundane cement bridge we had traversed minutes before was actually a breathtaking structure of high, stone arches. Before long, we were looking up at it from below so as to experience the full impact of its presence. The airflow and ambient temperature; the sound the wind made and the way our voices echoed gave it an otherworldly quality, as though the arches represented an area of permittivity in a great veil that divides realities. So the railroad tracks on which we had begun to walk and the gold of the late-summer setting sun passed such a threshold. “See that? That’s where we need to go.” I had pointed to the sacred singularity where the tracks met the horizon --- that distant and hypothesized destination where their parallelism fell to pieces. So that’s where we walked together on tracks self-same to the end of perception and the divergence of space-time itself, through a shallow ravine where a hawk screamed overhead. We told each other that we were all very much unafraid.