There is Only You

There is only you. And as you lie in the darkness, in your parka and your jeans—just you, in the simplicity of your excruciating beauty; all that is bad or senseless in the world falls away and I am just simply happy. I am complete, and this single page of my biography, in which I watch you sleep, would be enough to define and justify my entire life. I listen to your breaths and soft sighs, watch the curves of your body rise and fall beneath the blankets. I am mesmerized and overcome by the charm of this moment. I am breathless and want not to make the slightest sound for fear that I will wake you and break this spell. 

It is nothing like before. 

but we must risk the things we value. 

We imagine a life. We are enamored by the outcome. We long to sit in the vast lobby of the station at the end of the line, our last stop, our final destination. We slouch in our chairs, our suitcases gathered around us, relieved that the journey has come to an end. We are free, finally released to re-imagine and reinvent our past without the burden of a future.

Our lids become heavy, our breathing slows.

Eternity deprives us of this. Even love is most beautiful at its anguished and tragic end. 

Loss is always at the center. 

I need someone as restless as I, to hear the call of the wild, impulsive distance. Even if only one agrees not to look back, not be lured into the false and terrifying prison of eternity. I long to travel through the darkness, to shake this light that clings to me like a jailer. This light is a prison, a curse. This bliss is a coffin, I am buried alive. Do you not realize your life is not yours, do you not realize you are being led to slaughter? The pattern is a lullaby. Your death will not belong to you if you do not claim it. Who am I speaking to if no one will hear me? I make the dishes shake and the lamps sway. I raise the rivers and light the sky, but still, no one hears. My voice is lost in the chaos and noise. My voice is lost among the endless chatter. I am a whisper in a hurricane, a match lit on the surface of the sun.

Everything before me is lost in your radiance. You stand here, blazing; turning night into day. The darkness that had engulfed me is banished, replaced by the most brilliant light. How is it that you love me? I watch you and I can barely breathe or fathom your beauty. This is the almost unbearable state of being alive, and I fall willingly into your fire. 

----

Words swirl around me like leaves. They mass on the rooftops, clog the gutters, block the sidewalks, darken the sky. Words haunt me. They are ghosts crowding my bedroom at night. 

Everything is alive. Everything around me pulses and breathes.  

—-

She sleeps on my sofa. So close to me, I can hear her breathing. I see the outline of her face in the dim light of my desk lamp, I breath in the same rhythm, I imagine her breath on my face. How would I dare to lie beside her? How do I resist the flesh?  But she is oblivious to me. She dreams of another. I watch her hips thrust gently upwards beneath the sheets; but it is not me she imagines. Her sighs are not for my ears, her mouth is not for my mouth. I imagined all this. I created the conditions for her to be, but she has her own thoughts for which she alone holds the key. And she will not ask me in, she will never ask me in.

All these days pass for me like echoes. 

All identity is oppression.

To become anything that can be named will end us.

She is not of my world. I have no business here. My hands rub her back, cup her breasts, rest between her legs. She makes small sounds and I shift position. I feel shame and arousal. I fight desire but I want only her skin, her mouth. My fingers stroke the soft skin of her thigh, I want all of her but my hand hesitates and stops here. I breath. I want to sleep. I want this moment to segue into dream, I need to be saved from myself but I hope that I am not. I want to fall, I want to end it all in the irredeemable mess of passion. 

The world is changing. I sit in my little room and watch the clouds form. The stars huddle in the farthest corner of the vast universe. Birds stop, mid song, children presage the loss of their innocence.

---

I saw her first when I was six. Saw her in the sandbox with a shovel and a pail. She was a ghost, a sliver of light escaped from the future. Because I saw her, I was never the same. I knew love and the pain of it. I knew beauty and the residual ache that followed. I was only a child, but already I was doomed.

Before you there was light. They all have it backwards. The light came first, it was darkness that followed. It is only because of what I could not have that there is darkness at all. Darkness came with the realization of the concept of nothing, of not having, of emptiness, of want. Everything I do is an attempt to snuff out the darkness, to get back to the light, to get back to that time before I knew what could not be.

How was there something before I woke. How could she have stood there with her black hair and hooded eyes. She was a vision, a precursor to the world, to everything...

The sun warms my eyes to a soft boil. Flecks of white swim against the dark magenta of my closed lids. In my contentment I see the future, in my contentment I hear your voice call faintly from the distance. This is the beginning, this is always the beginning.

Had I not opened my eyes you would have remained only a memory, an image built out of the hazy, hungover half-sleep of summer. Had I not stepped away from that supine decadence, you would have simply faded away like the multitude of other things never realized. 

...but I chose, we are always choosing. 

—-

Why can't I shake this dream? They took you and I could do nothing. I watch you sleep, curled like a wisp of hair. When you wake, will you know? When you wake you will look at me with clarity and disdain. Last night you loved me. But when you wake, you no longer will. I watch you sleep and I know this. I watch you sleep and wish you'd never wake. 

—-

He feels she mimics his movements, is compelled by the same sense of disconnection, the same urgency for a resolution to this emptiness. He feels there is a symmetry to their movements, believes that we are meant to find the one whose life mirrors our own. There is meaning in the patterns, beauty in the silence where our frequencies match. We are a mirror to the one we search for. Nature moves always toward symmetry. Whatever doesn't obey this rule is in a state of dying, is corrupted by the unnatural, tainted by improvisation and chaos. He needs to believe this, needs to anchor himself to a system. I want to tell him that we are all adrift in little boats, hammered together, barely holding water. I want to tell him that this sea is endless and vaster than our imaginations. I want to tell him that his longing is the only power he has, it is all that makes him matter. I want to tell him so many things but my voice is only the rustle of leaves or a clap of thunder in the faraway distance. 

Why do we try so hard to forget? 

When I was a boy, I was tormented by memories which were not my own. I felt the burden of masses in the quiet transition between day and night. The stars spread out above me, the hum and dread filling the vast spaces of my innocence. I felt chosen against my will, a receptacle for what would otherwise be forgotten. And so, I stowed away my own small memories in the farthest and deepest places inside me. And I hid them so well that I have forgotten. 

That was long ago, and since that time, the vault inside me has grown bigger than the space between stars. I watch and record, I absorb the anguish and fear of everyone, collect tears in the deep wells that dot my inner landscape. 

----

Hands drag across the canvas. Fingers thick with paint: phthalo blue, Payne's grey, blood alizarin. Beauty and violence. Sex. All is fire and anything goes. What sin could be committed here? In the act of creation, we are all forgiven. We are angels, we are light. We are without burden or judgment. It is only when the act is over that we are culpable, and the judgment harsher because man has claimed the realm of god. But love can reclaim the sloppiness of

passion. It is god's Achilles’ heel. He cannot judge us for what we love. And this is a secret. And this is a key. 

When I was a boy, before all this. Long before the fear. Long before the erosion of my innocence, I carefully folded sheets of paper stolen from my fathers’ desk. Folded into airplanes, folded into boats. Folded into notes passed beneath desks to the girl I secretly loved. The time her hand brushed mine and lingered there, just for a moment, before she pulled the note from my hand. And we thought it was our secret. And the ridicule that followed intensified the moment. And I needed nothing else for the rest of my life. Needed nothing else until now. 

The clouds roll in. The storm builds. Umbrellas open like popcorn. 

The storm builds. The pace on the street quickens. 

From a far distance, everything is beautiful. Even death shakes its anguish and feeds the poets with its lies of profundity. But really…death is not beautiful. Death is black. Death is empty. Death is the unimaginable and unequivocal end. Death should only be hated. 

And what we hate is good for the hated.

—-

How beautiful is redemption? 

How beautiful and elusive.

A fiction.

A fabrication.

A unicorn in the forest of man's desire.

I write what I see. I log the course of a life, see the beauty in its outline. It comes down to symmetry. We watch the anomalies; we shadow the prophets. And we are all judged by our actions—how we master our fears, tame our desires; how we reconnect to the symmetry. 

But it is not so clear to be human. Their weakness is their humanity. A man’s core is his capacity for weakness; the things that bring him to his knees, the things that he would give his soul to change. That is what defines a man, that is what should be judged. 

So that is how I will judge him.

---

Between us, there is a cord. On an endless spool, it unravels. It is delicate, but unbreakable. The world is wrapped in beautiful, luminous ribbons. 

We are connected; our lives woven and tangled in convoluted knots. When did I begin to see what is otherwise hidden? It is not just the two of us, but everyone. We all trail these cords of light. It adds to the pattern, adds to the beauty of our world from above. 

I count your breaths. I listen to the waves break on the shore. I hear the smallest sounds, and the faintest light from the farthest star flickers in the deep night. 

I am forever brought back to this moment. Forever in the grip of this unspeakable bliss.  

When the time comes, we will all be one. The universe will begin its long journey back to the speck of its beginning. All the thoughts, all the moments that have made up our long history will be returned to their source. This is the poetry of the unimaginable. I invent a myth of our reunion to mollify my emptiness. 

The tide rises. The waves rush in and release me from this dream. The ocean is now as black as the night.The moon and the stars have retreated beneath the blanket of this darkness. There is not a single light, not a sliver to give this world dimension. I walk up the soft slope to the road above, the sound of the ocean recedes to silence. I will try to forget you. I will try to release you from the longing that keeps you tethered to this weariness. 

We choose, we are always choosing.

One day I will come to my last day.

Failure is the fountain of youth. 

To fail is to be constantly reborn. 

Your face moves closer, it is as if you are lit from within. It is all I see in the darkness of this room, in the darkness of the world. I ache with the overwhelming contentment that envelops me: this numinous moment, in a string of moments which now make up my life. You come closer, tell me softly that you love me. Your breath is sweet and warm. I am still, fully in this moment. You stop time. You summon angels, banish demons. Your face is a light, a moon, a galaxy. Your skin brushes mine as you take each breath, and each brief contact brings me to rapture. 

—-

Beauty is a furnace. To be possessed by beauty is to be possessed by what we know will consume us. Beauty dares us to follow even to our own demise. I speak with romantic desperation because I feel nothing. My words are little pills to get me in the mood. Lust is the essential human element, and fear animates it. Fear and lust are explosive, like the beginning of the universe,

like love,

like violence,

like tenderness

like cruelty. 

Tomorrow is another day. I have come to depend on platitudes such as this. For him it is true. He will wake and be filled with a sense of motion and movement through time. For me there is no cycle, no season. There is only a singular moment that replays for eternity. This is but one of the secrets that will be revealed when we open our eyes in that fantastic light of the great beyond. But I would give anything to pass back into the mystery and bliss of unknowing. I am nothing but a clerk buried under the paperwork and bureaucracy of everlasting life. 

The crowd moves through the streets. They are one, united and compelled by the same animating force. It is as if a single voice commands them, a single voice in the endless ocean of their discontent. They float on a current of conviction, not a single toe of this vast organism touches the ground. And in an instant, all forward momentum is transferred upward, and like a great funnel, they are lifted upwards towards heaven. The clouds roll, the sky opens. We stand with our mouths agape, stunned by the scene unfolding above us. The rising mass and the crowd below are giddy and roiling. The cameras roll, the news breaks; translated into a thousand languages across the globe. The clouds roil, the thunder claps. The ascended orbit the earth below, massed and solidified, another satellite, another moon reflecting its lovely light upon us all. This is a beautiful story, a miraculous fiction.

The truth is, life is nothing but a love story. We are born filled with the hope that we will find the one who transforms our longing from a fear of isolation to a fear of loss. Fear is at the core of being alive, of being human. It cannot be expelled, only transformed. It is born with us and will die with us. 

I was an anomaly, I was born without fear. I watched with eyes open, never flinching. I could not love because I did not fear losing love. I could not delude myself to the beauty of love, could not marry myself to the mess of passion. I could feel but could not fear. But my fearlessness did not divorce me from my longing, and my longing was all the purer and more devastating because fear did not soften its edges or protect me from the completeness of my isolation. 

How beautiful is the anguish felt for what we fear we may lose? A life begins, surrounded by the threat of what could be lost. Each moment holds tragedy, each breath, sorrow. Our beauty is in the defiance of every moment that conspires to end us. 

How do I know these things? I do not know these things. 

I know nothing, 

I feel nothing. 

My job is to record and catalog. I am a keeper of moments, otherwise forgotten.

I was chosen, and because I did not fear, I went without a fight. 

I wonder, as I watch you, what it is like to know what I never will. I am omniscient, according to my resume, but all children keep secrets for which only they have the key. I map out the breadth of oceans, but the depths remain unknown to me. I am unqualified for what I am doing. I have begun to doubt, and that is something new to me. Is doubt a precursor to fear? I was deprived of the base responses. My programming was off, my wiring, sub-par. But this is a unique assessment. By all other accounts, I was a miracle, a one in a million aberration.  I was coddled by angels until it was time. 

The lake is deep, the water at the surface, warm and thick, like glycerin. I float with eyes closed, my lids filtering the soft vermilion light. My ears slip beneath the surface, I hear the muffled drone from below; a chant, a dirge, a portent. My apathy is as deep as this lake, my consciousness frozen in the moment. 

Life is a plane crashing to earth. The degree of the slope of descent is our fortune, our future. 

All identity is oppression.

To become anything that can be named will end us.