September 4, 2012

• Our art is despair

  They laid down in the alley pool together. Not together holding hands, but just enough to have meant something to each other as strangers. A longer grip on the door on the way into work, a slightly tipped umbrella, a wipe of the brow while hunched over: we look for any sign in the eyes of a stranger that they might one day love us.

  That cardboard box we wanted to save forever in the basement now has frayed edges, and we never remembered to find out what makes our coworkers sorrowful. Now their lives are as remote as newspaper columns, and I find a crow more chatty than my neighbors. Animals are the only ones who believe in my loneliness. I can only wonder if others imagine the same things I do when I think of the Roman Empire.

  We try to invent more desserts, the myth that things will never end, and to complete something is very unhuman. We would rather linger in hell forever than to think that something could be over. I closed your car door and the vibration of the concrete curb made me forget the freckle above your left cheekbone. But there is no place for the erotic in society. We daily die in a thousand lies, all of them blank faces with silently sweating eyes.

  Society was never to my liking and Gus said I call society that which is impersonal, but I never told him I let them be impersonal because they are not to my liking. We camped together in the Badlands once and now that we’re back we just pretend to have a friendship. My pretend friendships destroyed my ability to love years ago. You can only love if you can think, for joyful creation can have no night-time mistresses. If it were true I would pretend for you for years; as is I get swallowed by dark stagnant puddles that never knew your name.

  Wet, everywhere, wet wet wet. People don’t think the sky is falling down anymore, but we fail to notice we die just the same. You never find out that you die, you always just knew; so we never even notice the sadness that comes with it, how everything is different. Our normalcy comes with not having been alive before we’re born.

  Males think there is just talking or there’s being at war, and we are always miserable when we’re not at war. But I found you and discovered there’s something in-between; you taught me how to live, and rescued me from the belief that we’re nothing if the world forgets us.

  I couldn’t believe in those who decided to divide up the world according to their thoughts, that through partitions we could one day find a beautiful unity. So we lie in this puddle and I don’t think in twos. The rain is dropping on our faces and we’re not holding hands, but I hate society, and something about you makes me finished in a sad way, a way that lets me know every stranger would love me one day. To mention the task is not to complete it. But I know I would never listen to a song instead if I could just come here and lie with you.

  Do you know the storm winds inside? The night I made out with Betty Sue until three AM and James Dean came on the television screen in that musty apartment for the fourth time? I love my mother very much but I can’t tell her because she taught me you can only love people in your prayers. That is the same reason I love her and it is that farness that makes me feel at the same time an incredible warmth, a true and final love, and a heartbreaking distance, the one that made me listen to music instead of people.

  So I know you are over there with entirely different raindrops on your face, and your childhood was set on an entirely different part of the planet, even if it was next door to mine. I feel sadly done completing the beautiful project of satisfied loneliness with you. In being apart I would find you more a part of me than if we were never to part. For you’ve given to me a warmth even in my anonymity, and it is around strangers your life finds its hold in mine. If only this puddle grew deeper we could drown in it, but even that betrays your childhood like an awkward and desperate future reminiscence never could.

  These feelings inside are finally made complete through a love in death’s face this world’s temporal sky doesn’t understand. Don’t throw me a line and I promise I won’t throw you one either. We’ll be brave in a poorly understood unison, just like the saddest humans to realize they had never truly seen one another. But it’s this turmoil in knowing your love but a truthful admission of silence owed to you that lets me know that the closer we get to others the more we have to suffer.

  ‘Oh, darling!’

  • 3:42 am
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