Category: Redux

You asked me what I was afraid of and I couldn’t articulate it at the time. This is that. That moment when you wake up to pee and she’s warm and asleep and beautiful. Not coincidentally her mouth is closed. And you look at her and think, “Fuck, if this doesn’t work then maybe nothing will.” How do two stupid apes rub against each other and still not tell you about the time, “I did this and no one else can know?” How can we call each other the worst words we can think of for years? How can we be happy when those words actually work? How do I look at you in all your warm beauty knowing you don’t see I’m warm and beautiful too? That you’re here because we have this unspoken agreement. That if either one of us were strong enough we’d say maybe this hurts too much. Then I go quiet and think about my life without you. Wonderful, terrible you. And that pang makes me dial. And pick up when you call.

I don’t know why cows say moo. They just do.

This system is broken but not because we can’t see the symptoms; those are remarkably obvious. We ask the wrong questions. We’re so busy asking what words to use that we forget to ask, “Why write?”

Words are what makes us different from the other apes. Chimpanzees can drink ants through makeshift draws. They masturbate and cheat on their chimpanzee girlfriends and wives. The similarities. Modern humans are more eloquent, not quite refined; we have commandeered the larynx. Guttural groans eventually became poetry. But Shakespeare is not possible without the first caterwauls. The noises that sprang forth from that almost human. Cautiously translated to, “That one is mine.” Or, “I fuck her, not you.”

And now we go to the moon and fear death.

The moment is so small that it makes bigger things happen. The moment has to happen now, so it has an advantage. It insists on being like a second on a clock. It says, “Whatever the fuck you want.“

I love pace. I see why it matters. I love compulsion. I see why it matters.

I love the parts that are compelled to go, “Go go.” And I love the parts that have the self-control to say, “It will be better tomorrow.”

I sat behind you at this concert (Portishead, Santa Monia Civic Center, if you don’t remember). You were a dancer. You did ballet. It seemed far too refined for me. For my birthday, you bought me a plastic hula dancer for my car that bobbled when the car moved.  You thought about me outside of our interaction. I suppose that was good. The hula dancer was horribly inappropriate, the worst kind of appropriation of something I actually do care about, but I wanted to fuck you, so I didn’t say anything.

Imagine flashbulbs going off. Life is that. What do you remember? A flash? Butterflies at the beginning. Love at a moment? Love ends. And then what? The way we deal with the way love folds our emotional clothes. It puts things in their places.

Lost. It’s hard to find the bathroom.

Love works separately from how you’d prefer it to work. It’s an octopus that squeezes to fit the empty spaces. Lost is lost. Love is not different. Love only hurts a little less because there once was something. It’s gone. There will be no more questions. If there were a few, theyʻre gone.

Ask. I can almost guarantee you will disagree or maybe hate me. I don’t really mind. Life is a pole slathered in vaseline. I slip toward the floor. I belong on the ground. Bleeding and oozing is what I know. You are a problem. So pretty and so French. The words come out of you. I have to make the words. I have to make them mean something. You slink. I trouble to be hidden when I try.

You have a boy’s name in French, but you’re Swiss. Where I’m from, I just have my name. You are vowels, and I am consonants. Hard at every guttural stop.

I know you love me, but you can’t love me. That’s a hard love. I’ve lived it before, and you haven’t. That is what life is. I’d expect nothing else.