(Source: libraryland)
When did you first realize that it had all gone wrong?
When I broke my promise.
Which promise? You made me many promises.
No, none of those. This was a promise I made to myself.
You see, the other day I found myself in the back of a subway car heading toward fifth street, and for some inexplicable reason, I had a sudden urge to write something. So I took out my pen and a piece of paper and I started scrawling away. My fingers were stiff with winter frost and the vehicle was very unsteady, but there I laid it down in permanent black ink. I didn’t mean for it to happen this way, you know. My hand was speeding away and I was already halfway into the story before I realized the person I was writing about was you. I gasped and that was when I knew that it would never work out.
Darling, what do you mean, it was merely a story!
No, it wasn’t merely a story. Can’t you see, I had just broken my number one rule. From the day I met you, I promised that I would never write a single word about you, for the restrictions of human language could never do us justice. I guess I was wrong. I’m sorry this is not what you envisioned, but I have to go.
Wait, but, before you leave, I have one more question. That story, I read it from your notebook last night. Sure, the main character resembled me, but that story wasn’t even about us…it wasn’t even about love.
Every story is about love-or, in this case, the absence of it.
The windows were open when I woke up—only the lazy billowing of sheer white curtains from LA’s nonexistent breeze was missing. The cigarette by my bedside was still tucked under a blanket of ashes; without thinking I swiped my hand so that the little gray-black specks peppered the floor, accentuated by the charred remains of a frail, white corpse—my own morning crime scene. I remember the dryness of the air—when my toes touched the floor I imagined I was stepping onto a beach path just beginning to be infiltrated by small sand drifts. Rising up, the skyline dispelled my thoughts of sea foam and sand dollars. The sky was such a pale, delicate blue that day—like china. The skyscrapers looked like cigarettes pulled different lengths out of a regal Marlboro carton, puffing wisps of smoke and cloud into the air until they dissolved, mixing white, brown, and gray with the blue of the atmosphere. A cerulean blimp floated in between layers of sky in the same way dying goldfish drift aimlessly in between sheets of water—I wondered then what it would be like to lean a little too far out the little window and tumble down down down between strips of sun rays alongside eight sets of red brick and little windows just like mine. No. I was a foggy pencil sketch; if I looked down, my barely solidified carbon body would emanate tendrils of graphite gray. Kind of like the artwork of an artsy college girl I knew—her drawings looked like the world wasn’t a given. Her drawings were a question, not an answer. At any moment, the scene, and I, her subject, composed entirely of silvery spider webs spun into human form, may fall hopelessly and wonderfully apart. Another body tangled its way into my fingers and coughed out ribbons of chemical smoke. I brought it lovingly to my lips and my black lungs swallowed it all.
I’m shaken by turbulent thoughts—turbulent like an airplane hitting pockets of air and cloud, turbulent like a stream as it trips over rocks but keeps running forward. My hands betray me as does this lined paper and pen. Virginia Woolf must have had fierier nightmares and Sylvia Plath horribler monsters. Their handwriting must have been a hurricane on a page spun about in their minds like whirlwinds and finally settling still like dust one syllable after another. I am not beauty and I never promised it. I am a modern-day tragedy forced from her bed at night with a tangle of words I have to unravel before I am pricked by their thorns. Or perhaps I should leave them there and let roses grow—untouchable. Un-understandable. And die. I am just a few bumps on the road, forgettable by the person on the passenger seat with his seatbelt strapped across his chest. I am not the wave that capsizes the ship. The black blinds tap tap at my window to remind me tomorrow is tumbling in and I am not ready for it. Close your eyes. You know nothing of demons.
“I think I found the word that describes the quality of living.
“Yeah, okay, I know, something better to listen to than the cadence of our footsteps over cracks of concrete, right? Or the rumble of the Ford’s engine we’re walking by? No, we shouldn’t slow down—what’s the point of that? I’m not revealing some bullshit philosophy that’s anywhere important on the cosmological level. More like the quality of life from day to day. How and why certain decisions are made—why people do or don’t do what they do.
“Alright, I’ll tell you. You smile—you’re still expecting something epic, I know you too well. Well, here it is. Transient. Ha ha, all right, laugh all you want. You still think I’m talking on the same wavelength of the galaxy or trying to derive the formula of the universe. You think I mean life is transient. No shit. I’m born one day in a hospital with squeaky linoleum floors and I’ll die some day because my mutated cells decide it’ll be fun to fuck with me. No, but I’m sticking to my guns on this one—don’t even start. Life from day to day is transient. Alright, if you let me finish, I’ll tell you why.
“Now that it comes down to it, it’s hard to explain. Like, how do you explain a tree? Sure, you can say it’s brown and green and pretty and leaves. Roots. Photosynthesis. I was walking back one night from work and I saw a tree in the lamplight, almost a bluish-gray, like an asphyxiated corpse. The trunk looked like woven masses of great steel tubes rising from the ground, pumping out grass. Then I thought to myself—hey, it’s one half of a lung. The trunk is the bronchus, branching out into bronchioles and then into leafy alveoli. What? Oh, right, sorry. As I was saying.
“Have you ever liked someone? OK, stupid question, duh. How long did it last? A week? A few weeks? A month? A few months? You know as well as I do, it doesn’t last. Half a year. Tops. You get over it, you look away, your ears redden a little less each time you hear her voice. It’s like liking a song. You’re all for that wordplay, that melody for a week, then it becomes a grain of sand in your desert of iTunes. What did our parents tell us? If you’re obsessed with obtaining something, put it to rest for a while. Do something else. Think about other things. When you come back, you realize you don’t want it anymore. Fuck, that’s scary. Scary what time can do to you. It takes away everything you ever wanted, if you let it. You start something, then you stop it. Your desire dissolves like sugar in water… but it don’t taste as sweet. Just tastes like plain nothing-ever-happened-here H two O.
“What’s my point? God you’re cranky today. Point is, what the hell is love? A crush can’t last you a year. What makes you think this construct called love will last you a year, two years, ten years, a lifetime? It’s transient. One day, you’ll wake up next to her and realize all your lovey-dovey has packed up its bags and taken the 2 o’clock train straight into the ocean and drowned itself. There’s no resuscitating it when it’s gone. Your eyes will be a ghost world, your heart a graveyard.
“Why are we stopping here? Wait, your bus stop is this one? Oh well, it was great talking to you. Sorry, I didn’t mean to get all pessimistic… You know I’m not usually like that. Will I see you tomorrow?”
“You’re overthinking
this,” he said, passing a cup
of coffee. “Relax.
It’s only a course
description among thousands
of others in line.”
Still, my fingers did
not leave the keyboard. My eyes
reflected blue light.
“Did I add nuclear
chem to the syllabus? I
don’t quite remember.”
I excavate the
jungle of Emerson and
Nietzsche on his desk.
He sighs angrily.
“Don’t you know what you could be
doing now? Should be?”
“No, I don’t,” I said.
“Tell me what you think I should
do instead of this.”
“You could be at work,
halfway to a Nobel prize,
creating theories
of space and science,
of atoms and molecules.
You could rise above
people like me who
remain tethered to the ground.
Why stay here with us?
Why preoccupy
yourself with kids who don’t care?
You owe them nothing.
Why are you doing
this? Transfusing years like blood
to another’s veins?
Let ambition take
the charge. See how far into
the stars you can go.”
To accentuate,
he slams his fist on the desk.
The glass mugs rattle.
He points to the wall,
where pirouetting planets
twirl on their axes.
“No,” I said. “Not yet.
I’m meant to be here. Not there.”
“Why not?” he asked.
It’s my turn to point
at the photograph beside
the NASA poster.
“Because electrons,
protons, stars—they can wait. But
people—they cannot.”
Control S. Save file.
“You will see someday, that life
isn’t about you.
Individuals
cannot afford to estrange
themselves, walk alone.
Who wouldn’t rather
receive thanks and warm smiles
than a cold trophy?
My students need me
more than I need my name on
some lofty banner.”
I point at the screen.
“Why do you think I’m doing
this?” I ask. “For me?”
He shrugs, picking up
his coffee and his Nietzsche.
“Perhaps. For your pride.”
“No. Not for my pride,
my gain. Not for me. No—I’m
doing it for them.”
Hombre pequeñito, hombre pequeñito,
Suelta a tu canario, que quiere volar…
Yo soy el canario, hombre pequeñito,
Déjame saltar.
Estuve en tu jaula, hombre pequeñito,
Hombre pequeñito que jaula me das,
Digo pequeñito porque no me entiendes,
Ni me entenderás.
Tampoco te entiendo, pero mientras tanto
Ábreme la jaula que quiero escapar;
Hombre pequeñito, te amé media hora.
No me pidas más.
You’re lying to me
over lemonade sips and
checkered tablecloth.
You, drenched in a pool
of half-truths and white lies, whose
words of sugar have
acid intentions.
Your sweet lips purse the same way
for the straw as they
do to kiss me; I
wonder how many straws in
your life you’ve tasted
then tossed. You, the king
of lemonade, drunk once more
on the cocktail of
deception—home-made,
hand-mixed, self-served, for sale, just
fifty cents a glass.
At what point does a shepherd leave behind his lost sheep? When he’s so close to getting it back, and then it kicks him in the shins so that he bleeds?
(via inspirart)
I knew something was
wrong by the look on his face
and sigh on his lips.
The opened textbook
fell across his lap, opened
to four hundred twelve.
I glanced at the clock—
exam in twenty minutes—
he didn’t notice.
“Some Zinc for your thoughts?”
I asked, nudging him in the
ribs. He half-smiled.
“Carbon atoms.” What?
“Or atoms in general.”
Oh? “What about them?”
He reached over and
wrapped his arm around my neck
and gave me a kiss.
“You’re made up of them.”
I laughed. “So what if I am?”
His smile fell, then.
“You’re just atoms.” He
replied, turning away his
head. “I’m just atoms.”
“Well, yeah. And what is
wrong about that?” I asked him.
His voice was soft, sure.
“Atoms don’t have souls.”
But his eyes begged me to tell
him it wasn’t true.
Down came the pastor’s fist on the white pulpit, his body cloistered in black, the boom of skin on wood reverberating from the microphone into sullen, passive ears. A few heads raised, some heads remained bowed from sleep or sorrow or guilt; mine remained straight, watching the preacher’s hands but intent on his polemic.
“Don’t you get it?” he cried. “Mankind is nothing. We are capable of nothing. We are as ants on a blade of grass in a savannah, about to be treaded underfoot by a great lion. Our knowledge is infinitesimal; as an atom in a galaxy of stars. This life is not yours—what you have done with it up to this point is to no consequence. What is not done for the Lord is done for nothing.”
At this I looked upward and caught his glance, his eyes angry in a fiery face. He did not look away, and neither did I—defiant, defiant, defiant. Slowly, I smiled, and shook my head.
We’re not nothing—we are skyscrapers. Piercing the flesh of the clouds, collecting their blood in the sea, sailing on it, swimming in it, defiant. From a hole in the ground to the heavens. From wooden tools to MRIs, from landfills to chemotherapy, cruise ships to Great Walls. Are their unreligious ungodly unrighteous creators meaningless, damned? Microwaves, laser beams, fertilizer, rocket ships, politics, violins. We are not ants, you fool. Open a children’s novel to find the depth of our knowledge; open a physics textbook to find the lack. With one life we’ve unraveled DNA, built computers, detonated bombs, walked on the moon. An atom is small, but it composes everything, even God. And one day we will split the atom.
I looked away and shuddered; over the years the four walls had become increasingly patronizing. I reached for my jacket, got up quietly, and headed for the exit. I did not plan on coming back.
And when he was done he heard her breathing heavily next to him, letting out soft sobs as tears trickled down her face. She did not speak, but her sorrowful eyes said it all. Why, brother, why?
Because the heart, out of its own caprice, chooses whomever it pleases. And the body, forever entrapped as its slave, forever the victim of impulsive whim, fulfills its every desire.
He looked down at his hands, and realized that he had comitted not one, but two of the most shameful sins of human existence.
She’s a friend.
