February 12, 2012
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Lifetimes ago
I jumped in front of the swashbuckling statue and struck my finest Napoleon.
“People only like war because violence is predictable,” said the girl with the lemon sweater and shoulder-slung carry bag. “Only conversation will lead you out of canvas paintings.”
I snarled and jumped in front of her with a fierce jealousy for a true life in my eyes. “I challenge you to a duel of meaningful lives.”
“I do that with everyone,” she said, bored. “Drinks?”
In the taxi cab I looked at her knees. “I don’t know if I like doing nothing or hanging out with you more.”
“Everything’s just an attempt to escape boredom.” She didn’t play with her hair.
The bar was brown and smelled like cardboard music. I told the bartender things and then we clinked glasses of ginger ale and whiskey. “To never understanding each others’ family histories,” I belted, silencing the bar.
We drank. A funny look crossed her temples and she pointed at me. “A demon a thousand miles away seems very similar to a demon nine hundred ninety-nine miles away.”
“Did you just undress my mind with your eyes?”
We walked out into a rain that smelled like a fall ocean. My suede pants were brought to their existential dénouement. I felt like buying a barrel to store memories in that I could one day burn rather than sift through. I smiled like a spelunker skipping school. She smiled like an orca whale after the extinction of humans.
The cars made their turns and soon the street was empty of the noisy hagglers of eternity. Water burgeoned like a revolution of ancient children coming out of their caves; I looked over at her, concerned that I would miss the water droplets splattering on her face. Inches from our sketchers-planted feet was a guzzling sewer.
“Cities breed alcoholism, materialism, and greed. There are no heroes anymore.”
I stopped watching the droplets and looked at her eyes burning blue as a white dwarf. “I associate you with sorrow.”
It was a couple hours or days later. I slicked my hair back and she hopped up and down on the porch of our dreams, a regular stoop in front of a yellow suburban house in a claustrophobic sea of its empty clones.
“Yes?” a crinkled woman with a brown reef of hair asked.
“Have you found the meaning of life?”
We had a feeling, but not a comunicable one.
“No feeling is communicable, silly,” she said, popping her eyes out at me with her regular philosophy-wide smile. She always had a Greek god’s sentiment looking at my head, as if to say “That’s where you live?” It was endearing and infuriating. I didn’t speak to her for a year. I genuflected on her doorstep when I realized I never remembered a word anyone else said.
“Humans want badly to be loved and are the most hateable thing there is.” She sucked on her milkshake straw like a rescue helicopter.
“They’re not any less loveable for being humble,” I remarked. “But most humility is just arrogance.”
“I’m done.” I hadn’t started my honeydew milkshake. I gave it to her and she finished it in the time it takes a dog to bark at a doorbell. She was wearing a malachite sweater; it brought out her freckled neck.
“Commercialism dampens creativity for all but a few,” I buzzed while walking with the stride of a Praetorian guard.
“It’ll get better,” she hoped aloud. ”It’s a virtue to let a person finish their point to their own satisfaction.”
“My whole life is a point.” She started running before I figured it out. “Hey! All the world’s vices will not melt into one unexpected virtue!” I yelled like a street cop’s whistle a moment later.
I had a knack for catching the world before it fell on her; she had a knack for finishing my visions of a perfect future. But we were cynical children at heart that learned to cope with iPeople by swordfighting on park benches.
We were always walking, the perpetual myth of going somewhere. In deathly winter mists we would walk and talk without seeing each other.
“Winter brings out the best in everyone,” she said.
“Their silence?”
I loved her most for the times she would tear down the towers I had thought my most sure hiding places.
One winter day we walked and said nothing, saw nothing, knew nothing but the world’s kindness to change. Then from within the blinding deluge of meteorite snowflakes she married me in her mind and said,
“You’re the only person who makes sense to me. I don’t know what keeps everyone else going.”
Vinátta, I thought.
