THE WORLD IS NOT A MIRROR

René Vasquez

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 I
IT WILL NEVER BE THE SAME

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It will never be the same.

That day.
The first time he knew it was really the end.
And in her eyes—no warmth, but a distance; and in
that distance, a strength he had not seen before now.
That day she saw him as a threat, defaulted to that
position.
One might think that in that moment, the air would
rush from the room; the space left cold, colorless. But
for him it was different. For him, the air became
richer, warmer; colors more vibrant, more saturated,
the world around him, and the woman before him,
more real, and decidedly out of his control. Life had
kicked in the door, torn down the walls.

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Such a solitary man. Such a strange and tortured
creature. Does he see into our souls if we stray too
close? Will our fate fall into his hands? Should we
shield our eyes as he passes, or are we his, already,
from the start?

He stood—fixed, motionless, locked in dismay.

Where was the hint of concession in her words, the
forgiveness and longing for him to change? Where
was the sadness in her voice, or in her eyes? It was
not there; not for him. Not for his ways, not for his
apologies, not for his charismatic departures from
normal.

How beautiful is redemption?

How beautiful and elusive.

A fiction.

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A fabrication.

A unicorn in the forest of man's desire.

Waking to the sound of his own breathing. Waking to

the sound of his own heartbeat. The sound of his
footsteps echoing the emptiness. The long closets and
high ceilings, the lonely counters and dusty sills.
Over time his brooding filled the emptiness. Over
time his guilt choked the spaces.

And his sorrow fell over everything.

And a map began to unfold.

It was surely a sign, a vision.

Over many nights, a dream. He did not write it down,
tried to forget the details.

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His dream revealed a face. He saw it everywhere. In
crowds it shifted from one person to another,
superimposed over the faces of everyone.

The dreams gave way to words, they filled his head,

cloaked his vision. And when he woke, the residue of
these words carried a scent, a taste. And these tastes
and scents where bookmarks, were triggers.

He had slowly divorced himself from memory. Lived

in the moment as if his past had disappeared. And
here memory was forcing its way back. Here, in a
wisp of lemongrass or gardenia, they flooded back to
him, and washed over him as he sobbed and bellowed
and lost his composure.

I write this, though I wanted to stay out of it, just

record what I saw. But I have moments when the
weight and the longing become too much. I hear
music, a word that makes me remember, makes me
ache for the mess of love, the anguished desperation
of hope. Am I too close to this? Did I succumb to the

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charm of longing? Did my objectivity bend under the
weight of his despair?
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.
That is what I am told.
Only…

I am weak. I am curious.

Is a man only what he seems, or is he, can he, be

more? I listen to the faint murmurs of dislocation.
The quiet indications that this is not quite what it
seems.

Intent …

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I am told to disregard intent, that it is only actions
that must be judged. 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.

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.

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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.
He looks for her face.
The storm builds. The pace on the street quickens.
He loses her scent, washed away in the downpour.
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.

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And what we hate is good for the hated.

The longer I walk the more the image fades. If I

pause, it catches up to me and my fingers tense and
the blood runs to them out of habit. I purged the
studio of paint, of pencils...everything. I broke my
brushes and burned them in the fire. But still, I
scraped the image in the walls, stained the plaster
with my coffee. A fresco— brilliant, beautiful, a
masterpiece.

I am not troubled by the vastness; the stars, appearing

and disappearing; breathing life and death into the
eternal universe. I know no more now than before,
staring hard into the night, trying to understand,
trying to grasp the infinite. But I only see the infinite
now from a different perspective, and it is only more
vast, more endless and indecipherable.

The dream parallels life, is stronger, perhaps, than

life; the residue of the dream, the superimposed
image suffocating the real.

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He sits on his bed, the night still draping over him,
the last restless thoughts dissipate in the soft
morning. He breathes. He forgets. He stands, and for
a moment he is light before gravity intervenes. This
begins his waking life: words on a page... and sleep;
the spaces in-between.

We connect on a level that is not known. How do we

avoid the populist descriptions of the quantum
universe? It is the mythology of the lost, the
shamanism of science. How do I avoid the trappings
of the miraculous? How do I express the oppression
of the mundane and base yearning I have for you? I
am inclined to believe the poets—that you are a
metaphor, that beauty is a Rilkean apocalypse. But I
just ache. If anything, you are a virus, a superbug, the
thing ticking me toward my demise.
You are a stitch in my side, an angel poking me with
a stick. Clearly, the joke is on me. I can hear the
laughter, faintly from above. Will you turn to look in
my direction? I search for clues of your devotion, like
a boy digging for treasure in a suburban backyard;

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something shiny now and then. My yearning is fueled
by a shard of glass or a scrap of foil.
There are so many of them. I sift through to find the
beautiful ones. My senses need feeding, my visual
appetite is staggering. I think of nothing but what is
beautiful. Is this the only measure of a thing’s worth?
I am at the center. I bestow value according to my
level of satiation. But it is pointless, I am controlled
by only your beauty. Your face is the center, I circle
you, and I will never get enough.
My name is rebirth. I am the phoenix, the endless
recurrence. I am Sisyphus rolling the rock of my
desire. My burden is my obstinance, the delusion of
meaning overriding the emptiness.
I wake with a slow jolt. My body arcs in a wave from
one end of me to the other. I rustle off the covers,
momentarily stunned by the tyranny of my blankets.
My body straightens and relaxes. I open my eyes, and
in the syrupy light of morning, words form in the air
above me. They are random, maybe, or a language
from my past; a memory from an ancestor embedded
in my cells, woven in my DNA. I believe none of
this, really. It is just the foggy remnant of a dream
ended prematurely; the babble and corruption of
images re-rendered into language.

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This is my ritual: I wake, I ride the wave rolling
through my body, I relax. I free myself. I open my
eyes and read the air above me. I speak out loud, I
speak in tongues.

I know a man who lives in a tunnel. The

tunnel is his mind, extended through his
eyes into the vastness of the world.
I know a man who lives in a cave, and his
darkness extends over the earth, in waves
of black and sacrifice.
I know a woman who lives in the sky. She
falls forlornly towards the earth, which
descends forever more rapidly than she.
I am a man who lives in the silence of his
own guilt, immortally bound, forever
returned.

Again, I reel from the scent of you. The memory of

your face, your words, your voice, drift through me
like music. My obsession disturbs me. My obsession

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rocks me to sleep, whispers in my ear. You are an
angel issuing orders as you fall from grace, as you
raise your sword, as you build your armies.
And how can it be that there are angels, anyway, and
how can it be that I entertain such thoughts.

I pretend to sleep. I close my eyes and count the

moments to infinity. I open the door for dreams to
come, but nothing comes; it is all forgotten. I no
longer sleep, I no longer dream. That is all lifetimes
ago; a memory from when I was still unfolding
mysteries; learning to walk, learning to see, learning
of love, of beauty, of loss. What should I make of my
narrowing vision? I should lament the loss of the
vastness, should curse the tunnel I am falling into;
but instead, I rejoice. The more I un-know, the more I
un-see, the more I feel humanity— the frail longings
and urgent desire. Beauty thrives in the spaces.
Beauty thrives where we lose ourselves. The longing
for the kiss is more potent than the kiss, The
separation from our desire fuels history—our own,
and all mankind’s.

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I trace the contours of your body, rest my hand at the
soft nadir of your waist, it has been so long; your
flesh long married to the earth, your soul content to
sleep forever. I am not so lucky. I carry the memory
of you. I carry the memory of your hair on my pillow,
your hand in my hand. I carry the memory of your
skin and your laugh and your brilliance. I carry the
memory of your last breath as your life softly faded
from your body. I live a burden of longing for all
eternity.

He walks the same streets, he enters the same shops,

he sits on the same benches. He feels that 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,

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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
thousands 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

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fear of masses, collect tears in the deep wells that dot
my inner landscape.

He sits in the café. His presence repels and attracts,

pulses the space, charges the air. He is at odds with
himself and with the world, yet he is charmed and
unscathed. He sits and listens for the silence. He
thinks he has found her. He struggles for the courage
to fix his gaze upon her, struggles to release himself
into the moment. Inside him the armies charge and
trample the dead, scorch the earth with fire and
remorse. Inside him the battles rage. He struggles for
the courage to forget, struggles for the courage to let
beauty overcome him. This girl, with her black hair
and faraway look. This girl with lips parting softly.
This girl, in this café, in this spot, in this moment.

Beauty is an act of rebellion.

Surrender, an act of defiance.

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Because I feel you, I will not fear the absence.
Outside the rain again falls. The clouds blacken and
roll. Animals seek shelter beneath the stoops and
under cars. Birds bequeath their final songs to the
wet, descending night. Because I feel you, I will not
fear the unknown. The rain taps out the music of our
distance and I sense the small ellipses and spirals of
your movement...somewhere, far away and silent,
you move through the world...beauty boiling the
atmosphere.

I am stretched and sacrificed. I have been martyred in

the name of beauty, exiled to graveyards of regret.

The one I watch has a name I cannot pronounce. It is

a consequence of my objectivity. It is a rule put in
place to prevent investment. Without a name he
wanders my hallways, bangs my plates, breaks my
glasses. Once there were so many others, and still
there may be, or I may be the only one left. I live
alone in this big house; when a stranger calls, I must
let him in.

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This is all a metaphor.
To counter banality, I make up stories. I keep a record
so that nothing is lost. How tragic it would be if the
moments that built a life were left to disappear. I keep
a scrapbook of epiphanies, scrape symbols of love
and loss into the skin of trees that populate the forests
of my subconscious. I do not judge, and a moment
ago I was lying about banality. I ache beneath the
sublime crush of man's vulnerability.

I breathe in and a life is lived. I breath out and

generations pass. Time no longer looks for me, no
longer imposes its brutal hold. I am outside it all. I
look into souls, behind eyes and into hearts. I know
so much, have learned to delicately pluck and archive
the most precious things. But still I know nothing of
myself. My box is empty.
When the world is asleep, I look into myself. I see the
waves and the far horizon. I feel the deep beneath me
and the fatigue in my limbs. Always it begins at this
spot, fear is the overture, dread, the prologue. Fear is
profound, fear is hypnotic, yet, for me, fear was
absent, so I am forever returned to this moment.
Perhaps that is why I am here; I am objective even

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about my own impending doom. Fear is an
affectation, the future, an indulgence.
But. I envy so much. Is this a form of fear? Is my
objectivity my armor? Could I lay down my shield
and last even for a moment…

I hear the call of the waking. I listen to the voices. I

am returned to my purpose.

He lies in the bath. She strokes his shoulders, washes

his hair. She says he needs to give in to her, let her
into his hidden places. He closes his eyes as her touch
dismantles his solitude.
His head emerges, breaks the surface. Each time, he
holds his breath longer, walks farther down the path.
He lives in two worlds at once and tries to gain
control. He tries to overcome fear, tries to overcome
desire. He tries to transcend himself.
He is a man of purpose and desperation. He longs to
will away uncertainty. He is the one who holds my
attention, he is the one I want to save. But this is not
my role. My role is to record and catalog, yet I am
compelled to do more. I imagine a comma placed

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here or there to change the course of his life. He is all
nouns and verbs; I want to shower him with
adjectives.

I confess that I have become less observant over

time. I fill in the blanks with generic transitions, and
give in to the luxury of reverie. I would like to poke
myself with a pin, or drop a hammer on my toe. I
would like to feel something that does not rise from
my own mind. Pain is perhaps what I miss most; that
lightning crack of ache at the source, the anticipation
of the damage.

He performs the ritual. I am troubled by the similarity

to my own. He lies still, his body rigid. He stares at
the ceiling, stares through it, stares through the
clouds, stares into space. And in the cold
weightlessness, he rolls his still rigid body and looks
back towards the earth. He sees the patterns forming.
They are like crystals growing under a microscope.
They are intricate and beautiful. They are a plague of
desire, devouring the earth.

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Is the life we fabricate any less real than the one we
live. Does memory care of its fidelity to truth? All
history is a fiction, and our future, a product of the
compulsion and application of our lies. We are slaves
to our perception. We are limited only by our
capacity for deceit. We are complicit in our bondage,
authors of our own sentencing. We choose. We are
always choosing.

We live a life of cliché and platitudes, always

clutching to the familiar. We abhor our banality, but
tighten our grip.

I count my words. How many have I thought, or

spoken, over all this time, or written in my book.
What is the extent of my vocabulary? I imagine I use
just a handful of words.
I am not eloquent.
I struggle to describe what I see. I am fortunate that
writing is only a distraction. My eyes are a camera,
recording endlessly,

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I may be saying this all wrong. I may simply be
seeing what has already passed. Loss has embedded
itself too deeply in my experience, and I have
succumbed to it.
I think often of cruelty. I have seen so much.
Throughout my time here, it has been the only
constant. It is there in love and in beauty. It is on
battlefields and playgrounds. It is in our jealousies
and desires, in our dreams and in our nightmares.
Where does it not creep in? Where does it not drop
anchor? Where does it not metastasize?

And I think also of shame, how it measures our steps,

syncs to our heartbeats, finds the precise moment to
enter. It comes out of nowhere, a shadow inching
toward us until we are fully shrouded in its embrace.
It enters when we are children, when we are most
vulnerable to the eyes and judgments of others.

And I think of beauty, which has no equal. And it

occurs to me that these three things may actually be
the same.

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Again, she sits across the room. By now she has
noticed him, and she smiles awkwardly and wistfully
in his direction. It is fate, or it is not. They live in
echo of one another and were led inevitably to this
point of disquietude.
In this café, the two of them wait. Two lifetimes
pushing against each other, causing the walls to
billow and tremble with the faintest murmur. Both of
them know they must make a choice, and both of
them wish that even one more day would pass before
they came to this moment.

From this window, I see the world. I see all of it. The
faces and footsteps of everyone. On this ledge, I
place my coffee and the book in which I will write
their lives. The ceiling fan gently moves the air in the
swirls and arabesques that will guide them to each
other. The future pulses in this room, the dust beneath
the dressers waits to be born into stars.

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My memories contain a life and a death, in fluid
transition. What is there to fear except the knowledge
that there is no end.

The world outside blurs. The interior of a car is

reflected in its side window, is superimposed over the
view of the landscape rushing by. Two worlds, or two
versions of the same world, sliding over one another.
This is seamless, as our mind finds a way to reconcile
the two. All experience is like this. Our interior life
always superimposed over the reality of our context.

The boy throws a stone. It is automatic, a rite of

passage, an impulse born of the formative conflict
between good and evil playing out in his young mind.
He watches the stone travel the length of his front
yard, over parked cars, and across the street. He
watches as it sails beyond the hedges, and through
the large bifurcated pane that exposes his neighbor's
interior spaces. As the others scatter, he remains
fixed on the point of impact. He believes the stone
shattered not only his neighbor's window but also
something bigger; something he cannot define. This
memory becomes the defining and dominant image
of his childhood. That act, that moment, contained

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the seed of who he would become and how he would
place himself in the world.
As he watched the stone, he witnessed two
simultaneous but different versions of the same event,
and he thought, from that point forward, that the
world around him was perpetually in the process of
layering varying versions of events and experiences
on top of one another. And this would become a
primary component and influence of his system of
ethics and his conception of the world around him.

It is so dark. The door has been latched and he waits

for his time to pass. He lives a lifetime in the dark
closet, then two. He waits as the universe dies and is
born again. He waits as all variations lead back to
this; where he is again in this closet, waiting for the
others to let him out; to stare in wonder at his
imperviousness to loneliness. For him, everything is a
test. His will is the most precious thing he possesses.
When will this all end? He suspects it never will. We
are all in an endless loop and our fear is the result of
our misunderstanding of this. He feels as if he is the
only one listening. Or perhaps, he is the only one
who understands. His will is the most important thing
to combat what he knows. To know something is to

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suffer the consequence of a diminishing ability to
deny. Knowledge imprisons us and we lose the
luxury and lullaby of faith.
My faith is dismantled from the bottom up. The
foundation scavenged for scrap. I am left with
nothing but an idealistic vision; a child's conception
of the world.
I watch the true believers. I hear the conviction in
their voices; trembling and combustible. If I light a
match too near their breath, the world will go up in
flames. So, I fight the impulse. I do not trust the true
believers, but I am drawn to their fire. I want to be
near heat. I don't care what the source is, or the fuel
for its combustion. Climate shapes our language,
induces our passions. Heat is the proper ambiance for
revolution, where even our thoughts pant and sweat
with fever.
Where is all this going? I don't know, I don't know. I
am lost in my thoughts and I ramble. I am growing
tired of the infinite and wish to close my eyes and
never wake. I have lived what everyone wishes for,
and it is a burden I would not wish upon anyone.

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The stars align themselves for our amusement, as
they have from the beginning of time. I stare at them,
also, as I have every night from this same beginning.
The stars disappear and I see only the black, infinite
space that mocks my longing and taunts me with
meaning hidden in the darkness. I am the creator of
all of this; that is what the people tell me. But, in the
popular and fanciful mythology of science, we are all
the creators of the visible world. We are the endless,
overflowing litter of Schrodinger's cat: stopping
particles and waves in their tracks, staring them
down, collapsing them into tables and chairs and
T-bone steaks.

And where does this leave me?

We are within ourselves less than we imagine. Our

potential is but a whisper, drowned out by a
cacophony of encouragement and positive thinking.
We cannot be anything or do anything. Few will be
great, and fewer still, immortal. It is possible that the
world does not exist beyond the scope of my vision.

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Is the world erased in my wake? Will it reconstruct if
I look back?
How great are my powers of delusion, how beautiful
my denial.

A song echoes a memory. His mind drifts and is

absorbed into the consciousness of the world. What
is his significance? Might he fade away if the one he
loves casts her gaze upon another. He feels slight and
barely there, he knows she is holding him to this
world, making him solid and vulnerable to the
frailties and failures of being human.

He lies in the bath as she moves about him. Together

they create a world of tight spirals and French curves.
Words fill the space, fall like a mist, coat the
counters, stain the walls. What happens when a poem
is forgotten? What happens if the words are not
saved? We live in a swirl of language; invisible
paragraphs surround us like dust.

My appetite for you cannot be satisfied. I long for a

moment of respite as strongly as I long for your

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mouth. My days are numbered, my fate is sealed. All
the pages of my book are blank but for the last. The
end is printed and etched and illuminated. I sense you
even with the great distance between us. I mirror
your movements, still, as you dream. You, on the
other side of the world; you, flying in airplanes,
sailing in ships. You speak a language foreign to
mine, and the words that fall upon my shoulders are
confused and mingled with this foreignness. We
speak to others in words they will understand, but
what we speak to each other, is a language that is
ours alone.

Where you are—I imagine the streets are lined with

flowers, and from the windows above, people strain
to see you pass and disappear into the distance. I
imagine the air around you agitated by your breath,
and little arcs of electricity pass from your fingers to
the pages of your book. How could I live without
these thoughts of you?

If other worlds exist, if they are layered, one upon the

other; in each I am bound to you. In each we are
entwined. There are no worlds in which we are not
forever being drawn to one another. This is a law of

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nature, this is an inevitability contained in the birth of
all that exists. This is an inescapable consequence of
the existence of anything.

I knew before I knew you.

I knew that the pace had quickened, and that there
was another.

There is a future where I am without you. It is the

future that began this book.
There is a future in which you do not love me; but no
future in which I do not love you.
And in every future, as well as every present, I
suspect I am being watched.
I am watched with indifference, though I have sensed
the weight and pressure of a beginning interest
pushing against me. When I wake, I feel the
atmosphere in the room abruptly change; so subtly, as
if my shadow has opened the door and left the room.
Our angels have been replaced by cameras; our
thoughts and movements catalogued utterly and
without reprieve. We are forever watched, forever

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seen. The past no longer vanishes. Memory has left
the realm of poetry, nothing is forgotten, nothing is
transformed.
We have lost the slow, dreamy rapture of forgetting.
I live in the city of angels, though I have never seen
one, though still, I sense I am being watched.
The world is consumed by fire just before I wake. I
spend the morning holding back tears, holding back a
dread, which, if let in, would never leave me. I am
forever shoring up the cracks through which it could
enter.
I am in the slowness at the center, where time does
not fly. I live a lifetime in your briefest absence, am
reborn in the space between your breaths.
But if I called and you did not answer. If I reached for
you and felt only the cold white sheet. And if my
pillow loses your scent, or I find the last strand of
your hair, beneath a table or tucked within the creases
of my couch. What would the loss of you look like
beyond the obviousness of your absence? How long
until your image fades into the fogginess of my
imagination. How long until I catch my breath.

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This is all just a fabrication, a fantasy, a story I am
just now writing...
I ache. I gasp for air. I drift at the center of a deep
lake.
I ache. I gasp for air. I drift in the infinite emptiness.
My ears slip beneath the water line, I hear only the
muffled sounds of my own blood circulating. I look
into the night, past the planets, past the stars. I know
there is beauty in the infinite. I know the vastness
holds secrets, but it is only your beauty that answers
the questions implicit in my longing. My solitude is a
poem to the lonely, my loneliness, a gift to the
martyrs.
But this is all mute. This is all a lie. I am a wreck and
a shell. I have been condemned to longing. I see only
your face, want only your skin pressed hard against
mine. How complete is my want, how sublime, my
deprivation?

God should not pretend to see me. I need no more

convincing that he is there; that they are all there,
jockeying for their piece of humanity. We wear their
uniforms, cheer for their side. I don't need the
recognition; I prefer to go unseen. I slipped from

33
God's embrace as I slipped from the womb, I was
born unbound and unsaved. I wander, even when I
am still. I see, even when I am sleeping. There are no
seasons, there is no respite.
I am at the center where all is calm. I am at the
center, where the breeze simply blows my napkin
from the table. There is nothing to think about here,
nothing to be troubled by. It is in the outer circles
where life is messy. You are the beginning and the
end, you are the center. How do you stand it here,
how do you continue?
You are a puzzle to me. I have overcome loneliness,
but not the memory of it. I wear the residue of once
having loved and been touched by another—but you;
how do you continue without even that. Fear of loss
makes us human. All that we have, all that we love, is
immediately transplanted by the fear of losing it.
Loss colors everything, it fuels our emotions;
separates us from the lesser creatures.
I live in fear in the midst of joy; every kiss, every
rapture, terrifies me. But how could I want it any
different. The precariousness of our happiness gives
it value, risk is inherent in everything worth anything
at all.
I want to be forgotten.

34
I want the residue of my being here scrubbed and
washed away. It is the memory and scent of those
who linger that drives us mad with longing and
apprehension. We drift in and out of the temporal,
like dust. I am redundant, a broken record, an endless
loop. I am in denial of my own fear and write to
convince myself of my courage. I have been through
this before, I remember things I should not
remember.
I want to forget. I want the curtain drawn, the lights
shut; the doors locked and the windows shuttered. I
want the noise to stop and for silence to suffocate me
to endless sleep. But I am eternal, as we all are,
eventually. In the face of physical world, my defiance
is all bluster and futility. The universe continues in
poetic indifference. The vastness is unfathomable and
to contemplate it brings me to weeping.

I revel in your bliss. I cover every inch of you with

kisses. Your eyes roll back, your lips part.

When I was a child I walked with dread. Hand in

hand we would go. He pointed out the perils waiting
for us everywhere. He told me of the dark beauty of

35
terror and loss, made me close my eyes and open my
mouth as he placed just a taste of it on my tongue.
I should never have taken his hand, never opened my
mouth. Had I never known, I would be like the others
crowding this café. The chatter and laughter—pure
and unencumbered by the darkness of its opposite.
Through the window I see the language of
acquiescence and I long to be a part of it.
Everywhere there is noise. This incessant music and
chatter, as if silence would make us disappear. And if
only it would. But I can attest to the fact that we do
not disappear. Our fears are unfounded and should be
replaced with others. Permanence is a horror, eternity,
a curse, yet we long to be spared from the dark
foreboding of the finite.

What becomes of our unsatisfied desires? The

unrequited is the engine of eternity. I am a slave to
beauty and will never be satisfied. I throw coal on the
fire of my immortality. I cannot help myself.
In ways that I do not want to understand, you are still,
and always, here. I do not want to know the
mechanics of this mirage. In my old age, I will pour
you coffee and ask you how your day has been. I will

36
sit across from a dream and fill my longing with the
gift of my delusion.

The dishes rattle with the thunder. The mismatched

shapes towering precariously stacked; this is a
metaphor for my life with you. The rain pounds our
newly planted hydrangea. The rain is hypnotic,
beguiling. I look at you, coiled on the sofa, reading
the language of numbers. I tend to my garden of
words. This space is bloodied and occupied by
ghosts.

We sit, hand in hand; our feet buried in the cool sand

at the edge of the world. The ocean is silver in the
disappearing light and pink clouds begin to form on
the horizon. The infinite becomes more infinite as the
sky turns black. The horizon disappears and it is only
the faraway stars that illuminate the sublime contours
of your face. I am in love; with you, with everything.
Here, I understand the ineffable; all that matters, all
that explains anything to me is right here, next to me,
softly humming the music of forever.

37
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.

38
The tide rises. The waves rush in and release me from
this dream. The ocean is now 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.

How long will the recognition of my final breath

linger? Time is relative. I do not understand the
science but I respond to the concept just as I respond
to music or the sound of the word “lovely” falling
from your lips. Perhaps time stretches and slows so
that the moment of recognition of our end becomes
another lifetime spent in sorrow or joy for what has
been and now is not.
If there is anyone who loves me, how will I say
goodbye. I do not have the courage for that. I do not

39
have the courage to close my eyes and never wake.
But this is the only thing I can know for sure; that
this moment will eventually come. This is the only
absolute, the only thing we must all agree on, even if
this unanimity is cloaked in an equally universal
denial of the inevitable.
Is it desire or fear that rules me? In the end, I suspect,
it is both. If I deny love, I am free of this question.
There will be nothing to fear, nothing to desire.

Failure is the fountain of youth. Success drives us

forward, secures us to the linear. We remain fixed to a
path that leads to the inevitable apex, then decline.
We follow the scheme, stick to the plan, and our lives
are played out in scripted roles appropriate for our
age and sensibilities. But our failure takes us off this
path. There are no rules, no succumbing to the
process of ageing or the withering of dreams. 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

40
numinous moment, in a string of moments, which
now make up my life. You come closer, softly tell me
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 like

staring into the sun, or leaping into waves crashing
on the rocks. 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 our universe, like love, like
violence, like tenderness and cruelty.
I have banished myself to the fringes. My last
remaining subject is, himself, teetering on the edge.
He sees what others don't, and that was my fault. I
didn't pay attention when my world leaked into his.

41
The seals have become worn, and I am not as diligent
as I once was.
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 up 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

42
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.

We hold hands as we walk. We are the center of the

universe, and everyone we pass falls into our orbit. I
know you are better than me. I know that my own
core is drawn to you, just as all the others are. I was
always falling toward you...always. Because I felt
you, I didn’t fear the darkness. Because I felt you, I
felt no other.

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

43
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 catalogue. 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

44
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,
subpar. But this is a unique and personal 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 vermillion 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 future, our fortune.
I have begun to see movement at my periphery. I
sense I am being watched. How unlikely that would
be the case. I am the one who watches. I was chosen
for my impartiality and detachment. I am invisible,
even, almost, to myself. It is possible that I am tiring
of all this, that my strength is waning and that the

45
weight and responsibility has become too great. My
boxes are filling up and I am running out of spaces to
put them. My chore was to collect the generalizations
of a person's life, but everything seemed important to
me. How can the essence of a life be condensed to
generalities? I am unqualified. My detachment forces
me to see the connections, and everything is
connected. Everything is relevant to the story.
Abridgement fails the subtleties, loses the meaning
found in the quietude of one's banality. I have
collected too much and can throw nothing away.
My world is crossing into his, and his into mine. I am
having dreams. I sleep, and wake with the faint
residue of attachment. It is a perfume on my pillow, a
ringing in my ears. The unfamiliarity makes me
uncomfortable, makes me want to lock the doors and
shutter the windows.

He sits in the café, and she is nowhere. He wonders if

he has woken from a dream and found himself in a
different café in a different city. There is a ripple in
the pattern and he wonders how it can be. A word
misused or not properly assigned its adjective; eyes
opened when they should have stayed closed, or a
rapture misread as lament. He scrambles

46
imperceptibly to adjust to the flaw. He has complied
without complaint. Enslaved himself completely to
the dictates of the pattern. He fights against panic,
waits for the anomaly to correct itself.
He sits in the cafe and she is nowhere. He thinks she
has been absorbed by another. Thinks she sits
elsewhere waiting for a different man, in a different
café, in a different city. In a different time.
He wants to break the pattern. He sits watching the
spot where she should be. Watches the space that
should contain her lips softly parting, her eyes
looking deeply into his.
This is his moment. I watch as time loses its hold on
him. This moment is suspended and could last
forever. His ache and his anguish make it difficult for
me to watch, but it is my duty, my obligation.
This is his moment to choose his outcome. It is a rare
and beautiful choice.
And though we are always choosing, we
uncommonly alter the pattern. He is an anomaly, a
miracle, a one in a million aberration. He sits in the
space where the pattern has broken. It is as if the pen
has skipped on the page. The space of a pixel, a
universe in miniature, but boundlessly beautiful in its

47
possibility. He is drowning in loss, he is breathless.
He feels like he is falling, though he sits still as stone,
locked to his chair, locked to the moment. He
considers the possibilities, the multitude of moments
he will never have with her. He is like Darwin's
finches; an evolution of the design in the blink of an
eye. He is unblinkingly fixed on the space she does
not occupy.

What we love defines us. What we love is

superimposed over everything.
What we discover we cannot live without, frees us.
What frees us, lifts the veil.

My words are words for you only, though I have yet

to set my eyes on you or feel the fierce ache of your
absence. My words are words set to the meter
throbbing at my neck. My words are like ashes
scattered at sea, waiting for a miracle of
reconstitution.

48
The waves break and disappear, absorbed and
forgotten. I watch as they roll in. The sun grows and
bursts at the horizon. I stand frozen in this moment of
such astonishing beauty. It is indifferent to me, and
more breathtaking because of it. I am absorbed in the
apathy of the moment, absorbed in the immutable
indifference of the world around me.

I have become part of the fabric. I am a motion in a

vast and indifferent machinery. But I have been
undone by a face. I have been undone by the briefest
glance in my direction. I am a loose screw, rattling
around until I fall out the bottom. We never know
which are the essential ones until we lose them.
The rain falls softly as he sleeps. The machinery of
the world hums in the far distance. The night holds
his mind still, shrouds his dreams in a thin gauze of
contentment. The machinery of the world builds
cities as he sleeps. The machinery of the world
creates and destroys. What was, is no more. What
never was, soon will be. It is an endless cycle, an
expanding inevitability.
The one he loves, was, but is no more. The one he
loves, never was but soon will be.

49
He sleeps for a lifetime as the world is renewed. He
wakes with the ache of a memory he cannot bring
into focus. This is the beginning, and this is the end.
He is doomed to the pattern and he has no choice.
But he will see things differently. He will see the
beauty in the bondage. He will translate the system
into yearning.
He is ardent and he is earnest. He sees beauty in
everything, he is blinded, he is breathless. He is only
a boy, but he is filled with purpose and possibility. He
looks deep into the eyes of the girls on the
playground, looking for the smallest twitch of
recognition. And the force of his looking brings some
of them to tears. He alienates and repulses, he burns
and glows like an ember.
He is shunned and he is ridiculed. He is
misunderstood but feels no shame or remorse for
their antipathy. He is a convert, a true believer, a
brilliant and blinding light in the deepest, darkest
night. He is a messenger, a holder of a secret. His
suffering is beautiful, his suffering is bliss.
He tries to memorize his steps, tries to imagine his
life seen from above. Each day he draws the course
of his steps in his journal. It is a densely woven and
vibrant history. He chooses colors to document and

50
mirror his moods. His book is beautiful and without
words. His book is a history of the world, a history of
love in loops and swirls.
Now he is a man. He is an architect. He builds
towers—graceful, ethereal spires, beacons to the one
he searches for. He builds them for no other reason
than this, they are monuments to his devotion. His
journals are worn, he has filled volumes with longing
and anticipation. The air hums and dances around
him, every molecule invested in his mission. He
moves as if he is floating, he moves as if the world
does not exist.
He and I are linked. It was unavoidable, and I think it
must have been a part of the plan of which even I am
unaware. I am aloof and uninvolved, or at least that is
how it was with all the others; that is how I
understood my role. But I have seen the future. I have
seen the face of the one who will love him. And I am
smitten. I have conspired to nudge him off her
course, prolong the inevitable so that I may linger
longer on her faraway look and the soft parting of her
lips.
We are linked, but he is pure and I am not. I am jaded
and entitled like all of us who are outside time. The
consequence of our estrangement, is that we have no

51
consequences. We model our own behavior, create
our own morality. I have already crossed a line and
perhaps there is no turning back, perhaps I have
altered things already too much and I have no choice
but to see them through to their inevitable end.
I watch the ocean churn and flow. I fall into its
depths. The water is like ink, the blackest, deepest,
blue. It is frigid and the saltiness stings my eyes. I
want to go back, erase the memory of my exile. And
if I could go back, I would not let them take me. I
would have run, I would have fought them. I would
have seen into their angelic eyes and realized they
were as much darkness as they were light.

We must risk the things we value.

I agonize, I despair. I want to reach him, tell him I am

sorry before his world falls around him. I want to
blame this on the pattern, divert my culpability, share
as an equal in his anguish. I want to stop myself, but I
am as much enamored by the messiness as I am her
softly parting lips and faraway look. It has been so
long, if ever, that I have felt the rush of uncertainty,
and the gluttony of risk. I have fallen into his orbit. I

52
have lost my objectivity and am written into the
script. I have been used, I am discarded and I hear the
faint laughing, once again, from above.
She is light as air. She is beautiful as the ache of
loneliness softened by the glance of a stranger. She
looks through things, past the familiar to what others
do not see. Her hair is black, and she twirls a soft
strand of it around her finger. She seems always
somewhere else, as if one has constantly just missed
her, like the world is in an eternal state of catching
up.
I am stunned by beauty. My sight has been veiled by
indifference, but my fall has revealed things I have
forgotten.
The clouds roll in, they curl and grow, become fat
with the rain that will soon fall. I am still both
everywhere and nowhere. I have not yet been
released from what holds me to this otherness. Only
my mind has broken free, and my eyes consume what
was formally hidden. I long to be part of this, I have
only the faintest memory of what it is to actually feel
anything at all. It is all just information now, a
distorted mirror to what is real.

53
Somewhere, this separation does not exist. I tell
myself this story, though I do not believe it. It is a
myth like everything else, and if we look without
desire, we see that there is really no difference
between something and nothing. There is no past, no
future, we are forever locked in this recurring
moment.
She sits at a table near the window. The light casts
her half way in shadow. She is darkness and she is
light. Always she exists in the spaces, she is a bridge,
a thread. She is beautiful and oblivious to it. She is
radiant. I stare and cannot shift my gaze. She is the
eye of a tornado, the birthplace of stars. She sits as if
this is not the case. She sits as if she were just a girl
in a café. I have made only the slightest adjustment,
coaxed him to wake just a moment sooner or to sleep
just a moment longer. So, he does not alter his course
because the wait is too long at the crossing light.
Instead he makes the light, continues as if nothing
life altering sits, bathed in half-light, just around the
corner, in a café, along the path he did not take. I alter
the course of his future, I alter the course of the
world.
There is beauty in the ominous. That which threatens
us connects us to the foundation of what we value.

54
There is beauty in the unknown and in the darkness.
We are programmed to fear that the light
disappearing at the horizon will be the last glow of
light we will ever see. Our pessimism hosts our joys
and our hope. Beauty grows in the dark corners, and
dank basements—in the lean filaments of dreams,
glowing faintly to light our way. I close my eyes, I
welcome the darkness. I've had far too much of the
light.
But I am forced to confront the inevitable. However I
conspire to interrupt or redirect, it is all in vain. My
failure is written into the script. In the end, the maps
have been drawn and the destinations set.

I want to wake him up.

Today I woke, and when my eyes opened, the dream

began. It is a shift in my reality. She had, for the first
time, not averted her gaze. She locked on to me, and
within this gesture was the yes that altered my
existence. Though this was not expected, I know that
it was written. It is a stretch for me. I do not bow to
what I cannot take apart and put back together again.
My world is rational, everything fits. But the one

55
anomaly is the innate knowledge that, despite the will
that defines me, I am bound to a pattern from which I
cannot escape.
We imagine a future. 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
finally come to an end. We are free, finally released
to reimagine and reinvent our past without the burden
of a future to attend to.
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.

We carry a twin inside us. It is a shadow tethered by

agreement, a traveler unbound by the weight of our
despair. It asks little of us; only the briefest
acknowledgement, the faintest reply. And if we
comply, our shadow walks the halls of our darkness,
converting it to light. But neglect frees him, releases

56
him against his will, but fully in line with his nature.
And once released, he will never return.

She laughs softly, momentarily lost in a memory. She

doesn't notice that the world is focused on her, or
rather, that the world, the cosmos, everything past
and everything future, is a projection of her
consciousness. She is radiant, she is the center. She
sits with the weight of everything pressing against
her, but it is the gaze from across the room that
startles her out of her daydream. The space between
them dissolves into light, and before her rise towers
and spires, beacons to the one she has longed for.
I watch the two of them. Just two of millions of lives
playing out, like thread unreeling from a spool. In my
mind, I untangled the two of them from the others. I
isolate a sigh in the midst of cacophony.

He rows his boat in the inky sea, in the inky night he

rows and rows.
Past the place where the shore is no more

57
He rows and rows
Until his hands are raw and his muscles seize.
He rows and rows beyond the place where the
horizon ends
And the gods begin.
He carries his world in this little boat and sails it to
the one who will love him.

Can any of us know the extent of our reach. Who in

the world has had a thought of us, however fleeting?
Who in the world has loved us and ached with our
image burned into their thoughts? We are carried in
the minds of others. We are travelers outside of our
bodies, the image of us embedded in the experiences
of those in whose luggage we are stowed away. We
absorb and digest in absentia.
I do not trust the other side, too much mystery and
obfuscation. What good thing must remain hidden
from those it tries to entice. It is only a lure to a trap.
I need someone as restless as I, to hear the call of the
wild, impulsive distance. Even if only one of them
agrees to not look back, to not be lured into the false

58
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 images. 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 there, blazing; turning night into day. The
darkness that had engulfed me is banished, replaced
by the most beautiful and 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.

I have watched you, against my instructions. There is

a moment that is quiet, a moment I discovered after
the cycle had played out more times than I can
remember. It is the moment just before everything

59
resets, the smallest moment, the blink of an eye. But
here is where I find you. And I take out the little box
that holds that one small memory of you; before I had
become what I am now, in the one possible outcome
where I grow old with you, I listened to a faint voice
from elsewhere that told me to save away a single
moment when we looked into each other's eyes. And
I placed that moment in a little box that I hid among
all the others in the vast store room of my memory.
And when all is still, and when time stops even for
you, I wake that memory from its quiet sleep. And
for only a moment, it is just the two of us, and
nothing else; looking into each other's eyes, stopping
time, locked in forever. I saw all that was possible.
The smallness of my world disappeared. It is what
made me susceptible to their call. My will was lost in
the vastness, I was made stupid by the promise of a
world with you in it. But that was before I knew it
was only a single possibility among an endlessness of
possibilities.

I watch you from the far distance. I watch as your

fingers tap absently on the table, and your head
sways side to side to the silence. I watch as crumbs of

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dust float dreamily in and out of the sunlight behind
you. I watch as the word "lovely" falls softly from
your lips

Everything leads me to you; forever, and always, it

will be this way. If I am only a dream, if all of this is
just a dream, you will be the one true thing inhabiting
the void. You are perfect, a circle, a harmony of
everything I have come to know and un-know. You
are music, you are the space between spaces. I cannot
get enough of imagining the reach of your perfection.
Within you is a secret, within you is the voice that
sings the beginning and the end.

The story of the world is a love story.

The story of my despair longs to be.
It is a metaphor that I watch from above. I am unsure
of the space I occupy. I sense that I am real but I may
be just a concept. I am the author of a dream within
the dream of another. It is possible I am here only as
a result of your memory of me. I exist within the
framework of your mythology. I was abducted by
angels, born in the nightmares of your adolescence.

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I am left to imagine, but to imagine was the first
thing they sought to take from me. I was told to
empty my pockets, hand over my keys. They
ransacked my drawers, turned over my mattress. But
they must have missed something because my
imagination is whispering in my ear, making noises
in the other room.
I run my fingers through your soft black hair. I fear I
am trespassing, but you don't pull away. I slip from
the ledge into the deep and inconceivable abyss. You
lead me to the edge, and with a breath, you send me
to my fate.
I have been falling ever since.
I am falling as I write this.
Because I am who I am, the world falls with me. You
are all falling with me and I am so sorry for that. This
should have been over, and all of you tucked, with
finality, into the soft bedding of eternity; lights out
and the last muffled "good nights" disappearing into
the emptiness.
But, and then I saw you. I was there or I was not, but
you saw me, and told me I could not look away. And
I did not look away. And because of this, the world
did not end and the lights did not go out and there

62
were no last "goodnights" disappearing into the
emptiness.
We sit with our hands almost touching.
We sit within a distance that defies the physical space
between us.
We sit in tragic hesitation.
What would be lost if I simply slid my hand to meet
yours.

I turned.

And for a moment

was fixed

in a strange loop.

I watched as your head swayed and your lips moved

to music,

a simple reverie; a bliss.

And in this moment, I was caught in your orbit,

63
pulled by the gravity and silence of your breath.

And it occurred to me, as this transpired, that I have

never seen your hair down.

I have seen your mouth turn to a crescent,

seen your dimples; black stars piercing a white sky.

I have heard your words roll from your tongue, like

thunder.

Seen your hands gesture like a poem that changed the

world.

But-

I have never seen your hair down,

never seen that black secret unraveled.

I have seen your eyes; two pools of inky black,

seen your beautiful face,

heard your laugh,

watched you rant and curse and throw up your hands

in exasperated urgency.

I have seen hidden places,

64
caught glimpses, like ghosts, in the corners of my
eyes.

I have ached and dreamed of you.

Have tried to look when you have not.

But your hair is still a mystery

Your heart is still a mystery.

Your mind;

A box within a box,

A world within a world.

Are you ever just simply alone? Has there ever been
a moment when the world has quietly let you be. I
wonder if you know silence, if you have taken a
breath deep in the embrace of your own solitude. You
are like Jupiter and its moons, Saturn with its rings.
The world pounds at your door, demands to be let in.
And how could you say no. You are programmed to
obey the laws as they were written. Programmed
towards progress, programmed towards complexity.

65
The origin of all beauty resides in you, I am
convinced of this and I have made it so.

Is any of this in my control. I have convinced myself

of my importance. I build things, I establish
connections, animate the inanimate. I breathe life into
the emptiness with words I bang out on my keyboard.
In the quiet of this room, at the very tippy top of the
cosmos, I watch the progress and regress of my
creation. I look over my shoulder, scan the heavens
for a hand slipping into the frame. I can't be all there
is. I cannot even remember a beginning.

I forget what brought me here. I think I may have

made the whole thing up.

I am dreaming that I am something I am not. I am

dreaming that I am a man, with eyes that have
lingered, for a time, on the soft contours of your
mouth. It seems that there could be nothing more
than this, nothing that could make me more than who
I am. Perhaps you are really there and I am on the
outside, looking at a scene in which you are laughing
and simply going about your life. Perhaps I passed
you on my way to an appointment, and became lost
in the epiphany of the parting of your lips. Perhaps I

66
watched for only a moment, as I waited for the signal
to change; watched your wrist slowly turn, like a
page in a book.

How long have I stood on this corner, waiting for this

light to change?

I walked—deep into the night, deep into the misty

premonition of morning. It is an assumption of the
inevitable. But every step is a step into the unknown,
a leap of faith, a choice, an oath, a declaration.

I declare with this next step that I am moving closer

toward you.

Everything is a love story—a story of lost, and found,

and lost again.

We roam the night. We walk alone and bundled

against the harsh chill of our isolation. With luck we
brush the arm of another or catch a faint, sweet scent
of sweat building in small beads and rivulets along
the soft contours of a woman’s neck. We walk the
dark, quiet streets; gaze for a moment at the fierce

67
beauty of the stars, or listen to the waning sounds of
the city poised to sleep. We are metaphors, but for
what, I don’t yet know.

I am the wind and the rustling leaves. I am the river

and everything struggling against it. I am the night
descending upon the earth, I am the ocean pounding
the shore. I am stillness and I am fire. I am
everything.

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 whole, 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

68
slightest sound for fear that I will wake you and
break this spell.

It is nothing like before.

Do you remember when we drove, far out away from

the city. Our life became an echo as we pushed
farther and deeper into that dark night. Do you
remember when you told me the moon was red as the
paint that still stained your hands. You told me you
loved me in that red glow of moonlight, told me you
loved me as your red stained hands gripped mine as if
to save me from falling.

And on the day that followed, the gods and devils

fought to the death as they fell to earth writhing in
obscenity. Their remains scattered in fields among the
flowers, in an eternal unity of opposites. And that
was the end of the gods and their opposites from then
to forever.

And from then to forever, there is also only us, our

hands intertwined on that dark road beneath the full,
red moon. And we fell together in the front seat of
my car, and we fall forever, falling in love, falling

69
from grace, falling into the mysterious and beautiful
unknown.

What will become of us, you and me? What will

become of the words spoken just between us? Where
do they go, once they drift beyond our reach? We are
surrounded by words; spoken by ourselves and
others. They press against us, echo in our ears with
the urgency or tenderness with which they were
originally spoken. Our dreams are formed by these
random whispers, fueled by the words of others, our
memories are infused with the memories of the
world.

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.

In this small room there is a bed and a dresser. There

is a lamp and a bedside table. There is a window that
looks out over the street below. There a strained view
of the mountains to one side and the sunrise to the

70
other. There is a door leading to a small bathroom
with a shower, a toilet and a sink. In the closet, hang
four pairs of pants and seven shirts. The drawers are
stuffed with underwear and socks. I set my coffee on
the sill. There are books under the bed and a mirror
over the dresser.

I rarely close my window. I like the sounds from the

street and the cool air that comes in the evening. I
usually fall asleep in my chair. I don't often use the
bed but I change the sheets daily. There is a burn
mark in the carpet in the shape of an iron.

A woman and two little girls live upstairs. Every

morning I hear the footsteps of the little ones running
back and forth above me. It is a sound I have come to
depend on.

Everything is counting down, everything will end.

My arms turn brown beneath this blazing sun.

Daytime seems a dream to me. I am used to the soft
grays and diffused light of night. I spend my days
now walking. I spend my days creating distance.
There is a vast space between us and my only
function is to increase that space. My days are

71
devoted to that, my nights do not belong to me, I am
still bound by obligation.

If I could spend every moment with you, I would not

count the days. If I could spend only a single
moment, I would cherish every second. Neither one
will ever be—not a moment, not forever. You exist
only in the past, and that past obsesses me. Every
new one I make has aspects of your face, or a trace of
your gestures. Every new one is but a shadow of you,
yet I still churn them out. I still animate them from
my chair by the window.

There has never been one like you. You are an

anomaly, one who should never have been.

You changed everything. I saw you and it was over, it

was impossible for me not to wake.

I fall into you. I am lost in you.

This is my defiance. This is my revolution.

This is not what was expected of me. I was not to fall

in love, I was not to even imagine love, or be drawn
to the chaos and disorder that is love's domain. But I

72
am not in love, it is more than that, it is something
else; it has ended me and begun me.

I sit in my chair and look out the window. I listen to

music and snack on chips from a bowl cradled in my
lap. I finish a beer and reach for another. I watch the
people on the street below and erase them as I look
away. I close my eyes and briefly fall into a dream.
How did I inherit this role? I observe time but I am
standing still. I document lifetimes as I reach for
another chip. I am on the outermost ring, barely
moving as the center spins at dizzying speed.

This is a strange dream in which everyone is in

agreement. I think, sometimes, that one day they will
all throw up their arms in unison and cheerfully
acknowledge the ruse, and we will all laugh and go
back to living life as before. In this strange dream, I
am all that really is. Even the room I sit in is the
product and projection of my isolation. I build
everything from the shards of my longing. But my
despair and my loneliness, all of this, is a product of
the bigger question of my all-encompassing
bewilderment.

73
I cannot place myself into the minds of any of them.
This is my limitation, I can never see what they see,
or know what they know. How do they look at me?
Do they look at me with pity or gratitude, or an even
more unpalatable combination of both?

But this is a lie. I see into the minds of all of them. I

hear their thoughts, decipher the chatter. I have not a
moment of quiet or respite from their passions and
epiphanies. I wake to their tears on my pillow, feel
the ache of their losses deep in my bones. I should
turn out the lights and lock the doors, open the oven
and turn on the gas. I should stop my complaining
and make a choice. But something other than me
animates my indecision. And this tells me there must
be something more. Something that isn't me or didn't
originate with me, something from before, something
that remains unknown to me.

I've heard the chants, seen the altars. The sensual

focused on the mysterious and terrifying unknown,
translated into a mythology of the divine.

What do they know that I don't? What do they see

beyond the obvious?

74
Beauty is a sword.

The stars burn to be recognized and written of.

The ocean churns to become a metaphor.

I have almost forgotten why I write this. I write to

bring you back to life. I write to bring you out of the
shadows.

Everyone moves about. And at least some of their

thoughts are theirs alone. These are things I will
never know, these are things that no one should. But
they are losing that. They carry no home inside them.
There is no shelter, no refuge...

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, her feet stick out from the beneath
the blankets. I breathe in the same rhythm she does, I
imagine her breath on my face. I am a slave to her. I
will never know freedom, nor do I want to. How
could I dare to lie beside her? How do I resist my
obsession? How do I resist the flesh? My skin longs
to be pressed to hers. I know nothing else, I want
nothing else. I want to be locked in this moment of
longing forever. This is what it is to be fully human,

75
to be fully alive... yet I am neither. She is oblivious
to me. She dreams of another. I watch her hips thrust
gently upwards beneath the covers; 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.

And all these days pass for me like echoes.

I will do this forever with no end in sight. I have what

we all wish for, but there is a moment when one
realizes that to know the future is to have no present.
There is no longing, no beautiful and terrifying
unknown into which to lose one's self.

All history, all progress, is incited by curves. The

curve of a hip, the arc of her back, the soft, slow
slope of a mouth...Straight lines do not inspire, a
circle does not arouse; it is closed, it is the end of a
story. What is complete, what projects its end, cannot
inflame our desires. It is only that camber that stirs
our passions and has us smelling blood.

76
I have become reborn. I lie to create my life. I am
nothing but what I desire, my want is the laboratory
of creation.

All identity is oppression.

To become anything that can be named will end us.

I live in two places at once. My hand rests on the soft

curve at your waist. I watch you sleep, your lids
parting so slightly. I see your eyes dart side to side as
you slip into dreaming. You watch the world as you
sleep, you live in two places at once.
I no longer believe it is necessary to define anything.
Delineation keeps me from you. A thing without a
name has no boundaries. I will un-name everything, I
will undo words.

Nothing belongs to anyone, not a word, not a

thought. Not a book, not a painting. We borrow
everything and depend on the borrowers before us.
To claim ownership is a pitiful indulgence. There are
infinite possibilities, infinite arrangements, but all of

77
them exist already and always, from the beginning.
None of us owns what is possible.
Clearly, I am watching you. It makes me almost
giddy. I watch you through time, I pause and replay. I
am losing my grip, I can barely hold the world
together. Occasionally someone will step from the
curb into the abyss, or the sky will remain dark too
long after it should have been morning. I have done
this too long and I am the only one who still attends
to my responsibilities. The others have long ago
forgotten, and walk in circles around their separate
domains. Their worlds lack intervention or even
observation. Perhaps that is the inevitable and proper
outcome but I can't bring myself to leave this all to
chance.
I have been reading books.
Really, I am not reading books, I have only been
turning the pages. I mimic you, I watch you do the
same as you watch her. You do not read books, you
only read her, you look for signs of recognition as her
eyes accidentally meet yours. It seems so long ago,
for both of us, since she was drawn to you, knotted to
you, destined for you. You broke the pattern when
you made the choice and I did not stop you. How did
you change the outcome, how is it that I let you?

78
Time has extended beyond the ending. I did not plan
for this, so we all wait as you find your way to her
again. This is all that ever was to be. We all stand,
awkwardly on stage, long after the final line is
spoken. We all stand here waiting for the curtain to
be drawn and the exits to be opened. But nothing
happens, nothing happens because you still sit,
watching as her blouse lifts slightly, exposing a sliver
of skin as she reaches for her coffee. What will
happen when you learn the truth; that I have lost all
control of the situation.

I sit in my chair by the window. I watch the people

move below. I hear the future rumbling beneath my
bed. I have sat here so long. I am losing my ability to
remember back to the beginning. I think it may be
your life I am remembering as my own. I have come
to resemble my captors. I have forgotten myself. I do
not own a mirror, I am a ghost reflected in high gloss
white above my bathroom sink. I could put an end to
all of this by simply closing my eyes and lying down
in my un-messed bed. And if I slept, you would all
sleep. And the sky would sleep and the sea would
sleep; and the earth and the stars and every thought
and every regret would sleep forever. And the walls

79
of my little room would strain and bulge to contain
all that is sleeping.
But I won't close my eyes, I won't dream you away. I
promise, I am in this to the end. I once knew how the
end would come, but now I have forgotten. I became
too engrossed in the sub-plots. I am contained and
bound in a simulacrum.
There is no beauty in poverty. No meaning in the loss
of innocence or the slow anguish of loneliness.
Wasn't this all supposed to be about beauty. Isn't that
why there is art and language and music. I thought
the abundance was a celebration, that this was all an
overflow of the bounty of your being. What was the
point of the suffering? What was the point of the
unrequited longing? They told me I was chosen.
Eventually, I believed you, that you were the
beginning. But where are you now? I think that all of
you left me to clean up this mess, or rather, left me to
watch as it all falls apart.

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 have no self-control. I want
only her skin, her mouth. My fingers stroke the soft

80
skin of her thigh, I want all of her but my hand
hesitates and stops there. I breathe. 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.
What sort of victim will I become? It is the victims
who drive history. The victors move on to other
things, but we cling to our losses, desperate to
leverage our defeat.
Love is not real. Love is an invention. Love conquers
nothing. Love is nothing without conditions, it is a
necessarily selfish thing. It is an affliction. We are all
sick and dying from it if we are lucky enough to be
sick and dying from that and not something else. I
was not supposed to fall in love. It was a concept that
was pried out of me before it was to have taken root.
But my keepers were not men and did not understand
that the concept of love develops in utero.
There are things that are not known, not to me, not to
anyone.
Before I accepted my fate, I had a vision of my future
as a man. How does a boy know the shame of the
man he might become? How will he understand the
anguish of his failure? I extinguished this future with

81
my choice but it did not cease to exist. It is like a
statement struck down by the court, as if those words
could be forgotten, as if a judge can erase the
memories within which those words burrowed and
built their nests.
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.
The world is changing and I let it happen. I have
given up, I turn another page, open another beer.

I lie in the full sunlight, my skin turning brown and

hot beneath this blazing sky. I hear the ocean rolling
in the near distance. I feel her hand rest briefly on my
hip as she reaches across me for her drink. My eyes
are still closed. I fear opening them in this brightness.
I am afraid I will not recognize her. I am afraid I will
not recognize this time or place. This woman, who's
hand brushes against me with such breezy intimacy,
is a stranger. When I open my eyes, she will know it
too. I am a coward, I cannot bear more of these
moments. How many have there been, thousands by
now, I lost count long ago. In the beginning, I tried to
comfort them. In the beginning, I begged them to

82
understand that their loss was necessary, that they
were chosen. I watched the anguish form in their
eyes, watch the shudder of recognition that their life
was only a lie. But now, I simply walk away; before I
can witness the joy of life slip away from them
forever.

It occurs to me that I have used you. I was never

objective. I planned your future at your first breath. I
could not touch her, so I used you. Every thought I
placed within you inched you closer to her. You were
my surrogate but I became lost in my manipulation.
You have begun to control me. My obsession has
taken me off course. I have forgotten about the
others. I have neglected their progress. The world
revolves around only the two of you, everything else
is scenery.

If I had known, I would have run from them. I would

have banged on doors, turned over trash cans,
screamed for help. Had I known, I would have called
to the neighbors to turn on their porch lights, open
their doors, call the police or pray to god. But I did
none of these things.

83
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 dome that
shrouds my vision. 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.

84
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 thousands of other things
never realized.
...but I chose, we are always choosing.
I used him to get to you. Who can I blame? There is
no one here even to judge me, no one whose mercy
and forgiveness I can beg. I cannot give away my
guilt. I have vaults filled with the guilt of others but
there is not even an envelope to house a sliver of my
remorse. I carry the burden of endless souls but my
own burden is unbearable. I brought it upon myself, I
know, but how could I do otherwise. She walks
through the world in breezy perfection. All clichés
and trite platitudes become profound when applied to
her. So even the flowers really do weep at her beauty,
and the stars actually do pale in contrast to her
radiance.
You—you are the sun around which I revolve. I am
tired of my life, if that is what I can call it. I often
revert to the old ways, revive the language of the
terrestrial. I hate what I have become, despise the
panting lust and desperation. Is this what you would

85
expect from me? I only make some rustling noises as
I unwrap the future. It is nothing really and if you
turned up the music just a bit you wouldn't hear
anything at all. There would be nothing to wonder at,
nothing to fear or tremble at in the darkness.
I lose sight of the fact that your awareness of me is
almost none. You wonder if there is a beginning and
an end, you lose yourself in the beauty and wonder of
the world around you. You grieve and weep at the
devastating misfortune of others. You wonder why
your life is charmed and for a moment you are
overcome by the guilt of this realization, but this
soon passes and these dark thoughts give way to your
radiant default. But you are not to blame for this. It is
not your fault that I am distant and manipulative. I
am, myself, only an observer in the capricious
manifestations of the terrifying.
But for some unfathomable reason, this was not
enough.
I look for you, as if you will become
someone/something else in the space between rooms.
You enter the hallway, I watch you traverse the space
and I search for a change in your step that would
signal a change in the weight of your heart. You lift
your head, you pause. You look at me and smile, but

86
you look through me: you are looking to something
or someone else beyond me.
Have I disappeared? Was I ever not? I occupy all
space, all time, from the quiet isolation of my chair
by the window. I am a fool. I am fooling myself. I
live in a trance, a state of euphoric displacement.
Always, I am somewhere I am not. Always, I am far
from home. The rain falls softly on the sill. The
breeze turns my sheets into oceans. My isolation was
beautiful. I wore my losses like epaulets. I waved
from my window, a martyr anointing the masses.
The rain falls softly on the sill. The ceiling fan spins
in a disconcerting wobble. My isolation is beautiful.
The sound of footsteps from above comforts me,
steadies my breathing. I am growing tired of the lies
but it is my way, my essence. And my lies are
beautiful. They animate the world and make all
things possible.
I entertain the possibility that I am just a man
suffocated by his despair. I play with the idea that
nothing is in my control, that my memories are only
the foggy remnants of all I have destroyed, all I have
lost. I grow sleepy with the weight of an unrelenting
sadness. I fight my drowsy descent into the nightmare
of my growing isolation.

87
The world waits at the hollow of your neck. All
progress halts in the space between your breaths. I
did not make this. You were before you were and
always will be. You are the carnal infinite in black
hair and incandescence.
I love you. I say these words over and over, hoping
the repetition will make the knowledge go away. But
it doesn't go away. The words fade to nonsense but
the substance and implication of their meaning grows
denser and more complete. I cannot escape this. I am
bathed in the tungsten light of catastrophe. Our future
is unalterably written and entwined.
What can I do to reach you? We occupy separate
worlds but I am aware, always, of your presence. I
know that you hear me. I am the voice in your head
floating just above the chatter. I am the voice in your
head filling you with prophecy. I am the voice
trespassing your dreams...
You do not know me but you would sense my
absence if I were gone. I occupy a world
superimposed over yours, but I have no weight, no
substance. I am a shadow, I am the thought that
disappears in the process of remembering. What can I
do to reach you? You are blind to my advances,

88
impervious to my charms. And I could literally move
mountains, stop time, tame oceans. But any of this
would be lost on you. You are dismantled and
dethroned by a single one, and you are forever drawn
only to him.
In spite of my ubiquity, I am a failure. In my
thoughts, I am still just a boy, lying in grass, staring
with wonder and anticipation at a future somehow
written for me in the language of the clouds. Now I
see the world only in neutrality. There is no color, no
possibility; and above me, only the low ceiling of my
small room. Everything is written, everything known.
But though it is written, it is no longer true. I changed
it all because of my failure. I am inherently weak, I
am not what they thought I was when they took me.
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 you will 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.
I wake with a strong memory of you. I search the bed
for remnants of your presence, but I find nothing. I

89
stare into the bathroom mirror. My face is longer than
the last time I looked. I have grown older and lived a
life I have forgotten. Last night I was young, but
when I woke, I no longer was. I am afraid of growing
old. I am afraid of the fear and desperation. I am
afraid of the frailty, the vulnerability, and the pity. I
am afraid of needing someone and having no one
there.
I try to reconcile the linear. My body doesn't
cooperate with my circular and hazy conception of
time. I stare in the mirror, trying to impose it, but my
face remains stuck in this forward momentum, I
move closer to the end even as I watch. I have lived
in such easy denial of the inevitable. My youth
lingered, and the young girls who swarmed around
me, desperate to be closer to my genius, fed my
appetite for my own unending youth. I needed them
to desire me. I needed them to want me for the basest
motives. I needed them to deny all reason; to exist
only in mad craving for my attention.
I have always known my future. I was born with
information I shouldn't have known. I embraced
everything that could exist without measure.
When we die, all is forgotten. It is as if we never
were.

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All is forgotten, and we are finally free.
I am not ready. These words I will say to the very
end, or mutter, incoherently, as fear of my demise
envelopes me. I will be gripped by the terrifying
notion that everything I am thinking and feeling are
just the random flashes of information, being erased
from my memory as I lie, gasping my last breaths,
frail, alone and already forgotten.

Nothing prepares us.

We are locked in our skin, locked in a room, with

only a single window through which to witness the
world.
What is it we want…what do we really want? Need is
irrelevant, antiquated. We are all want, and base
desire.

I cannot maintain a thought. I am trying to make

sense of all of this. Trying to leave a record, a
warning. I don't know if there will be others, or if this
will happen again. The universe is vast and I have

91
heard rumors that this was not an accident. But I don't
know what to believe. I look at the four walls around
me. I look at my hands, shaking almost
imperceptibly.

An envelope slides under the door. I look at it for a

moment, rise to retrieve it. It is like all the others and
I place it in the pile I have started on the floor next to
the dresser. They have been coming for weeks now,
or years, I don't remember. I am sure they are
instructions but I have strayed so far from the plan, I
don't dare look at them. I have built this world on
denial and I owe it my continued devotion.

I try to pinpoint the moment that the ground beneath

his feet began to crumble. Well, or does anything
exist just in a moment. It is possible there never was
another way, that this was written in the instant their
eyes met. He was destined to fail her, he was bound
to his fate and she was inescapably tethered to his.

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He searches for relevance, clings to the possible
beauty of his martyrdom. Whatever she will become,
he was the source. The air fills with his remorse, the
sills and counters thicken with the residue of his
despair. I sit in my chair and can barely breathe this
heavy air. My memories are nearly choked as well;
they fade and become thin and light, and nearly
transparent. I reach for them, I try to bring them into
focus, but I fear they are being taken from me.

Everything contained here is intentional. Everything

is written just as it happened.

I see the face in the space between strangers. I follow

her through the swarming streets. The sun descends
behind the tall, ethereal spires. Cold shadows drape
before me and I lose her in the quick flash of last
light that slips through the thin spaces between
buildings.

How long has it been since you left? I was not sorry
to see you go. The relief that filled me is impossible
to describe, I was revived and brought back from the
dead. But this life you gave me as you stepped across

93
the threshold of our togetherness striped me of my
defenses. I had become nothing but a fortress and my
coat was woven from our tragedy, my house built
from the precarious wreckage of our lust.

I try to decide, to will myself to something other than

this endless drifting. I have flashes of clarity. But
these last only an instant before I am once again
blinded and suffocated by the presence of your ghost.
I live simultaneously in the light and in the pit. I am a
dog running free until the chain yanks me back.
There are two of me, twins separated at birth. We are
tethered, both of us, to posts; on chains too short for
us to ever reunite.

I cling to metaphors to save me.

I cling to metaphors to shield me from what I fear is

true.

None of what I write is true, though everything is

written exactly as it happened.

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I look around me and I begin to remember. I
remember watching you leave and never return. I
remember the shame and the impossibility of telling
you what really was. I remember imploring you to
trust me and seeing the moment in your eyes when
that became impossible. I remember the sounds of
family. I remember the pitch of your voice
whispering in my ear, begging me to promise we
would never be apart. I remember knocks at the door.
I remember the smell of lemongrass and the rumble
of the pipes....

I remember you now. I remember our life.

I sit in my chair by the window. The rain has come

and I watch the streets glisten and the cars skid. I
watch the sidewalks empty as the unprepared duck
for shelter in coffee shops and under awnings. I sit in

95
my chair by the window and wait for the end. You
have missed each other and there are no more
chances. My desire has derailed the plan. I have no
ideas to change this outcome. Even I have no answers
and I can think of nothing to say to any of you.
I make my bed. I gather the final envelope slipped
under the door and place it with the others on the pile
next to the dresser. I take one last look at myself in
the mirror. I always thought that if I drop the blinds
this would all end, but I see the clouds roiling, I see
the apocalypse massing on the horizon. I feel a tinge
of guilt as I acknowledge the beauty of it all. I sit in
awe and anticipation at the possibility of feeling
something, anything, after all this time. I wait for the
moment of lucidity when the fire burns the flesh from
my bones as I watch my little room incinerate in the
wrath of my inadequacy.

I sift through our letters. Words float from the pages

like butterflies released from their dark
metamorphosis. They flutter past me until the pages
are blank and I scramble desperately to collect them
to memory.

96
A lifetime passes as the door closes behind you. The
lock clicks into place like a gunshot.

I wake to the sound of water. I walk the dark hallway

and open the light. The kitchen glistens in submerged
linoleum. Sheets of water arc from the ceiling to the
floor. My feet sink into the sogged carpet at the
threshold. All that is in darkness, disappears. There is
beauty in catastrophe, a wondrous disregard for order
and expectation. I stand transfixed on the potential
for disaster. I stand transfixed until the frantic
footsteps from the hallway snap me out of my stupor.
Why do I stand here doing nothing? I stand there here
doing nothing because none of this is real.

Do you love me?

Would you save me if I were drowning?

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Because, my darling, I am drowning now,
And I am drowning still.

I paddle at the surface as my twin sinks and takes in

water.

I hear his muffled, sorrowful gasps. My heart sinks

with him but I paddle still, searching the horizon for
any sign of you.

The sky is so big. It grows dark but not before

shrouding me in this brilliant vermilion. My
outstretched hands silhouette against the pale
cerulean sky, pink contrails crisscross the firmament.
I am so small beneath this miracle. I am so small
within this churning sea.

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The ocean is deep beneath me, the sky is vast above
me. And I am in the middle, at the very center of
everything.
I wake and slowly shake the dream from my eyes. I
hear you breathing, and the weight of your arm
draped across my chest soothes me as I transition
from that place to this. You are so beautiful in this
soft morning light. I am overcome by you. I watch
you sleep. I fall into the atmosphere and orbit of your
loveliness, I succumb to the gravity of your mouth.
You are the one, there is only you. But you are the
opposite of another and I am bound to the order of
things. I lie here in defiance of my duty. I am not
supposed to linger here, or run my fingers through
your hair, or touch the soft contour of your cheek. I
smell the sweet residue of sleep on your breath as I
slowly untangle the blankets that bind us.

Were you ever more than a phantom, a wish, an

affliction? I remember, but only for a moment before
my recollection is placed into the abyss, sent to the
depths of a fractal endlessness. I imagine a point to
all of this. I imagine an end, a reward for all the
suffering and disenchantment. I imagine angels
aweing me with the magnificent unfurling of their

99
wings, as they welcome me to paradise. I am
showered with the love of all those who shunned me,
caressed by a hand that comforts me, and makes me
forget my sorrow—forever in this pale eternity. But
this is a fairy tale and we really all know it. There is
no lamb in its wooly white, snuggling our sins away.

I shake the dream from my eyes. I walk slowly along

the empty sidewalk. The warm sun pulls the chill
from under my skin. Everything seems suddenly
normal and I feel no great sense of displacement.
This was promised to me once, as a reward for my
compliance. The colors here are crisp and deliberate.
In the air is a scent, generically fragrant. I feel
transported, transformed, transcended.

I belong here, under trees, driving cars, mowing

lawns. I am aware that I am dreaming but the
simplicity of this dream makes me wish to never
wake.

I dream and wake, I dream and wake. I will dream

and wake until I dream and wake no more. But what
if this never ends. Perhaps it is never ending now. I

100
play with time; I play with the measurement of space
in my tiny room. I watch the dust swim in the light
from the lamp at my bedside. Each one a galaxy in
the endlessness of space. It is my apathy towards
order that makes this all possible... This is the answer
to your existential question. This is the answer that
should justify your sacrilege.

I measure the space between my breaths. I measure

the space between heartbeats. The space between
anything will expand indefinitely until it is measured.
I contain and quantify. I constrain through the naming
of things.

I named you but cannot contain you. I made you, but

cannot possess you.
You are the one thing out of my control.
You are the one thing that obsesses and controls me.

I wonder if you speak to one another. You are not

only one person; this has just occurred to me. You
have all conspired to find me and I think it is all of

101
you who have been sending me letters under my
door. But I am invisible, you should not be looking
for me. There is only one of you who is chosen, only
one of you who must find him. It is not too late; my
room has not been engulfed in flames and I have not
been relieved of my burden. I sit in my chair and
stare out the window. I sit in my chair and look for
him in the shadows.

You have refused to listen. You have refused to break

the spell of your beauty. Beauty is a curse, I wanted
to spare you the burden it asks of all who possess it,
of all whom it possesses. But you brought it with
you. You hid it under your tongue, succumbed to the
lies it told you. Beauty is a trap. Beauty is a beast,
waiting to devour us.

Life is a story, a fiction. There is no truth, everything

is a fabrication. Everything is a lie.

I have kept you from each other. I watched the world

from my window, birthed the circumstances for you
to meet from the dust swirling about in my tiny room.
I allowed so much suffering to justify your union....

102
because you were supposed to deny everything but
love. And I believed this, and I attended to nothing
else for millennia upon millennia. But over time I
wanted it for myself, I wanted you to look into my
eyes only.

I trace the patterns in the dust on my sill, watch from

my window as you mimic the movement of my
fingers. You are still compliant, but she has broken
free. The two of you are analogs of my divided self.
The two of you are not real.

Water falls across my forehead. You place a warm

towel over my closed eyes, turn the spigot to warm
the bath. I feel your hand rub in slow circles across
my chest, and my body slips further into the tub. You
lift the towel from my face. I open my eyes and pause
briefly as my eyes acclimate to the soft light of this
room. In the mist I see fragments of the patterns, I see
the history of your movements like trails of light
hanging in the dense atmosphere.
Why does my memory always come back to this? It
is the one moment in my life when I chose, when I

103
agreed to be defenseless. It is the one moment in my
life that I knew that you loved me.

There is kindness and there is beauty.

Always, somewhere in the world, there is kindness
and there is beauty.

I have come to the end of my tether. The ribbon that

binds me has come loose from its spool and I am free
of the pattern. I am free. Am I the only one who has
come this far, am I the first to watch the ribbon flutter
as it releases from its mooring? I am free and I am
boundless, I am free and I am aimless, I am free and I
am without you.

What do I do now? I scramble to reconnect. I

scramble to re-entwine. I do not want this freedom. I
panic. I need to be mimicked and mirrored by you.

But it is all ended. I drift in the weightlessness of

space. I watch you grow smaller until you are just a
speck. I watch you disappear into the blackness

104
forever. And I am here, alone, just as I began, drifting
and rolling in the void of possibility, in the void of
the unknown, in the void of the eternal without you.

The sky grows dark. It presses down against me,

engulfs me in its pulsing malevolence. I have become
accustomed to this and my muscles tense against the
increasing pressure of its presence. I am chosen, I
remind myself of this as I slow my breathing. I did
not ask for its fealty. I did not welcome the overture.
But I had no say, I was born into the role. I was born
into obligation, born into servitude. My role was to
feed and mollify the beast. My burden was to bring it
safely to harbor.
My father reads the paper in the front seat of his car.
He sits, oblivious, as I coddle and pacify the devil, as
I orchestrate the heavens, churning and writhing
above me.

Again, the dream comes. Again, I am led into the vast

theatre. I know what is to come but I cannot wake or
fight it. I sit. The overture begins, the lights dim, the
curtain parts. Behind the glass, I see the world.
Behind the glass waves of bodies immolate and

105
despair. The orchestra intensifies their frenzied
rhythms, madly ecstatic to have been spared. And
me? I am numb and cemented by guilt. Beneath the
din of cymbals and strings, I hear the faint trembling
of voices—gasping, imploring, desperate.

We are a whisper. We are a leaf on the current. We

are here, and all too quickly, we are gone...but
something remains, I am sure of it. I would bet my
life, if it were mine to give. Surely you understand
this, surely you see what I see.

The ceiling fan spins in a disconcerting wobble. I am

back in my room in my chair by the window. I am
disoriented, I have memories of drifting; of you
disappearing into the darkness. When will this ever
end?

If only I had resisted

If only I had refused.

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When did this really all begin?
It is overlapped and braided.
It is all a convoluted knot.

My life has no beginning and no end.

There is no middle, no above or below.
There is only the eternal always, spread across time,
spread thin as moth's wings, thin as the line I should
not have crossed.

If there were no words, if there was nothing that

signified anything at all, would we still, and only, be
entwined in that base and nameless desire. What is
the word for when your mouth is moments from my
mouth, or when your skin, for the first time, brushes
hesitantly and desperately against mine? My eyes
gaze stupidly into yours, my heart falls into the deep
pit of our desire and it is all I will ever know. From
that moment to forever, it is all I will ever know.

I have kept three things from my life with you:

107
1) A scrap of paper on which you wrote,
"wherever you are in the world, I will love you..."
2) A gardenia pressed inside the pages of Ishiguro's
The Unconsoled.
And
3) The one true word you whispered to me, once
when you thought that I was still sleeping.
I keep these things in the farthest place. I keep these
things where they can never find them.

He watches as night descends upon her, watches as

the light disappears, watches as he waits to decide.
Watches as he steps into the inevitable.
And you have been waiting too but your decision was
made long ago and would not be derailed by my
intrusion. But how are you different from me? You
guide and manipulate him just as I guide and
manipulate you.
I had such faith in the pattern, such faith in the beauty
and purity of its intent. I held to this faith even as I
conspired to unravel it.

108
It is only our words that separate us, those we have
spoken and those we have only thought. I am only
what you are not, and you, only what I will never be.
We are the sum of what we aren't. We are subtracted
and divided by our relationship to others—until we
are nothing at all.
I live in the negative spaces, it is only here that I can
breathe. And so, I leave everything else to you. Every
other space is yours to fill, yet I know you will
overflow into mine, you always will, I cannot escape
it.
What do you want from me? Why do you pull me,
relentlessly, into your orbit? Here, again, I use the
same words, form the same concepts. This is a game,
this is all for your amusement, or are you also just a
piece of a puzzle; much bigger than both of us.

Do you love me?

I sit and stare at the loving couples, watch them

absorb each other with both sweetness and disdain. I
watch them wrestle, behind their backs, with the
shackles of love and forever so their lovers have no
sense of their confinement. We are all domesticated

109
animals, by our own choosing. But you and I are
different; our hearts growl and our fingers bleed. I see
the bars in the distance as the fog lifts. I see the
boundary of my domain and I understand that my
cage is only bigger than the other's.

Do you love me?

You hear my words always like a knife. You run the

edge along your tongue, kiss me, and make me yours
forever.
I cannot get enough of you, and in the obliteration of
my self, in the torrent of my desire for you, I will
always follow, always submit. I am weak and can
only destroy myself through pleasure. I don't have the
guts to face what I deserve.

My heart beats, like a drum, like a bar fight, like a

cannon echoing through the ruins. I wake in a panic,
the full moon casting heavy shadows across my
sheets. The dark bands press against me, imprison
me, suffocate me in my sleep.

110
I have only these words falling from my lips,
drooling on my pillow, or spewing in fits, like sparks
from a faulty outlet. I have only these words to stain
the cloth laid out before me; my life, my only chance,
a miracle woven from the filament of creation. I sit at
a table set for one, I stare at the door and the empty
chairs, I will not clear my plate until I am joined by
another.

I wonder if all of them were really only you. You

slipped behind their eyes just before they met mine.
You animated their gestures, knowing what would
pull me in. I am beginning to suspect everything
about you. I am beginning to suspect it is you who
watches me, you who aligns me to the pattern and not
the opposite.

My world is occupied by shadows. The living, pulled

and stretched to somewhere other, until they are made
translucent, barely there. I want the same for myself
but I remain solid, fortified by the burdens that
disappear for the others. I am mired in the sediment
of sadness.

111
And the other ones—the ones who have no form at
all—they share my bed, wear my clothes. I feel them
shift beneath my skin. I am an apparition of thoughts
discarded. I am full of wonder, I am full of doubt. I
want to believe you are the one who was promised. I
want to believe in the contract forged by my
abduction. I want to believe it was more than
appeasement, that it was more than just a distant light
stretching and fading into the unreachable,
unfathomably black frigidness of night.
I am all words. I choke on them in my mouth. I taste
their vile uselessness. I am all words and they fall to
the floor, heard by no one. The lightness has left
them. They no longer float. They drop like rotted
fruit, over ripe, over wrought, over and over and over
again.

We ride on a river of misunderstandings. We branch

out, diverge and feed into separate oceans. We
dissolve and dissipate and dilute. This is the
homeopathy of our relationship. It is all quackery,
and mirrors, and desperation.
It will never be the same, as it once was.

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It will never be the same.

I watch you.
I watch him.
I try to contain my envy, it is my most humbling
transgression.
You choose, but it was always meant to be.
I read ahead to the end, try to adjust the outcome.
But the pattern, forever and always, compensates for
any intrusion, becomes more intricate, more defiant.
We tried to beat the system, tried to find the blind
spot.
We kissed when no one was watching, we fucked in
the flickering spaces.
And I was in love and you were not.

Before you, I was perfect. Before you I conducted

smoke, controlled every little thing. I was content in
my perfection. And what more did I need? I needed
nothing until this moment.

113
It has occurred to me that everything I have done,
everything I watched through the window of my little
room would have, and has, gone on without me.
I lie in the bath. The cool air flowing over my
exposed skin. The hairs stand up, chilled to attention.
I drop my arms into the water. I am content and close
my eyes. I hear the soft music humming from your
lips. The bath is warm and I want to stay in this
moment forever.
You were never who I imagined, but you are
everything.
I am trying to defy the inevitable.
I am trying to negotiate a bargain, haggle a deal. I
have been dropped back into the river of time, liner,
breathless and desperate.
You act as though nothing has changed, but you have
given yourself to another.
But it was all in my head, anyway, as is everything
else and always.
Words swirl around me, fall into the tub, disappear
beneath the surface. I bathe in a bath of words; those
we have said and those we have only imagined.
Everywhere the air is thick with them, my lungs fill

114
and burn. Soon I will run out of breath. Soon even the
words that construct everything in my world will
dissipate and merge with all the others. My presence
will be lost to the universal chatter to which we all
one day will succumb.
There is a current that flows beneath the surface of
everything.
What is the nature of that thing that draws us nearer
to one another? Not just the two of us, but everyone. I
see their eyes roaming, their agitated bodies shifting
in their chairs. They only want one thing. Their needs
are simple and as impossible as mine. We are all
shells and bundles of flesh, but something animates
desire at the center of this mess. All we want is to
press our bundle against another's, have it linger
there, for a moment, and not be pushed away.
We are desperate in our anticipation to be touched. Is
there anything else we really want? To brush against
a stranger on a busy sidewalk or to have our hand
land upon another's as we reach for a ripe piece of
fruit in the market, or a book on a shelf. We fear not
being loved or having even the briefest moment in
which we think it might be possible.
Who am I speaking to when I tell my story? My
father muttered breathlessly from his hospital bed just

115
before he died. I watched him—vulnerable, exposed,
defenseless. For the first time I saw him this way,
squeezing my hand, pleading for me to pluck him
from the edge of the abyss. He was frightened—my
father, who never feared anything. Who was he
speaking to when he was afraid? Who was he hoping
would save him from his fate?
I wish to become a metaphor but I will never be
anything but analogy.
Who are you, exactly; you who watch me? The fog
thins, the sun rises. And all of you who occupy my
cells, who came before me and who brought me here
against my will—my ancestors, my makers. You
watch me, across this plain that separates me from
even the smallest possibility of connection. You stare
across this expanse and judge, as if I were a fly,
trapped in a jar, trying to escape. Who are you but a
drop of blood or a smear on a slide? I am but a single
note shared with any of you, but I am haunted by this
faint melody. I sway and dance to it against my will,
I am a hologram, a shell, a puppet.

We leave a trail of crumbs for only the eyes of our

lover. It is an act of desperation, committed in the
hopes that they will find their way to us, no matter

116
how lost we find ourselves. I howled this beacon with
my first breaths, hoping you would hear me, across
the years, across the distance. And you, who were not
yet born, heard me nonetheless.
Are you still searching for me, do you still hear?
Do you still collect the crumbs in that little locket
around your neck? I am leaving them still, my
darling. I am leaving them as I write this, I will leave
them forever until you find your way to me.

I am all in with my story of despair. I will match my

torment against yours, pit my sadness against all
comers. What better metaphor than this. A fight to
the death until only one of us is standing; to soak it
in, to bask and wallow in the spectacle and spotlight
of this heartbreak. Maybe this is the prize, the
purpose; How much feeling can we endure before we
break.

I have lost track of time, not only for myself, but

also, for the others. I cannot detect the traces of
erosion or gravity, or the carbon decay that would
otherwise alert me to their relative chronology. But I
do detect, or I think I do, a subtle increase or decrease

117
in the balance and angle of the floor as I stand near a
stranger. It is the subtle weight of their despair or that
burden lifted just a bit; a lightness caused by a small
joy or untethered thought. A microgram of weight,
this way or that, in the positive or negative; like the
weight of the soul, I imagine.

Her legs make a diamond as she stands, waiting for

her coffee, her knees subtly inverted, confused about
the direction they should bend. It is a bit disturbing,
actually, if I release myself for a moment from the
grip of my interest. She looks like she has forgotten
where she is. This is the thing I find most desirable,
and it makes everything about her shimmer and
sparkle, like the diamond formed by her puzzled
limbs.
Every day, and for weeks after, I came back, waiting
for her to reappear. And so many others would
occupy that spot (but never her) and their legs would
follow all the rules, and never once make a gem of
any sort—or anything beautiful, or surprising, or
unexpected.
But I have waited far longer than this for diamonds to
appear, waited eons for the pressure to build. And all
that flesh and fauna dead and forgotten, transformed

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and birthed into diamonds. And this beauty too would
eclipse itself in the slaughter it inspired. And what
will become of those bodies and dreams…well, more
diamonds, of course, and on and on until the earth
itself is engulfed by this sparkly and terrifying
beauty.
It is true, I am just now thinking about it. One day,
one moment, the sun will devour us and everything
that hoped to be born, but wasn’t, will be
extinguished before given the chance. How can I not
feel the sorrow of this, how far in the distance must
this event be for my heart to not be broken? I fear
there is no distance great enough for that.
I try to free myself from the flow, but it is impossible.
I am swept along, mixed and dispersed across time
and distance. The current circulates, swells around
me. It is impossible to distinguish myself from
anything, or anyone.
The clouds crawl across the cerulean sky. My heart
beats faster as I watch them grow and transform. I
want to be like this, but I am bound, and even the soft
grass I lie in seems to clutch me tightly to the earth.
I don't want to be known. I want to disappear. I want
to be unseen among the others. But time is running
out and I have been unsuccessful in my negation. I

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am untouched, unloved, I move freely within and
without. I move around and through things. I have
lost all substance, I am a ghost. Time is running out
and still I haven't found you. Time is running out and
still I am here.
And if I was wrong, what was this all for?
When they took me I should have resisted.
When they took me, I should have held your image
firmly in my mind. Locked you there, looked only to
you.
But
I did not, I went willingly. I went without a fight. And
in that moment, in that decision, I rewrote and
revoked everything.
And that, it seems, is why they took me. What was it
that caught their attention? I think I knew from early
on that I was somehow outside of the flow. From the
banks I watched the river of the world pass by.
But what they didn't know, what I hid, even from
myself, was that I wanted nothing more than to be
swept away, wanted nothing more than to become
part of the torrent, even if it meant losing myself
entirely in the deluge.

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Everything that is bad and destructive in the world
has its origin in our separation from innocence.
Everything that scars and taunts us, everything that
stokes and feeds that fear that was once just an ember
glowing in the distance, all the sadness and despair
and loss, every regret and desperate act, can be traced
to that moment we chose to listen to that voice,
whispering to us, that there is no power in innocence,
and no reward without power.
It is not the space around us that defines who we are.
It is not what we are called, by ourselves or by others,
that signifies our true name.
The world is not a mirror.
I have learned this, if nothing else.
We empty ourselves much too quickly, so desperate
to fill ourselves with something, or someone else.
I am afraid that this is all a big mistake.
Life is not a mirror; the world is not a mirror. There is
no symmetry, there is no pattern. We wander like old
men released too soon from their convalescence.
How did I last this long without seeing? How easy it
is to be hypnotized as we pass into this world—a
suggestion, a seed planted in the fertile soil of our

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newness. Why wouldn't we believe everything we are
told?
I listen to the rhythm of my thoughts. I give them my
voice and the words seem beautiful as I form them on
my tongue. I place a sound into the world, formed by
my mouth, my tongue, my lips. This gives me proof.
I bring my hand to my lips, feel the small pulse of air
that accompanies each word, each sound, each
syllable. I am a reflection of nothing, I am in the
world, I am real. I feel my breath upon my fingers. It
is direct, it is mine, there are no interlopers, no
intermediaries, no uninvited guests.
A thing is only what it is.
Nothing owns its name.
I wonder if there is anything I truly possess.
I know that I never possessed you, or even a moment
of your true affection.
I forget, too often, the anguish my disconnection has
caused you, and all the others who loved me, or tried.
I am building a boat to send myself away.
I will drift and plan my revolution

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And when the current brings me back to you, when I
land upon the shore in that mysterious and distant
future, I will lift the sword you left for me before you
lost your way. And I will thrust it in the ground and
claim this place for us, with nothing but the endless
sea and sky surrounding us forever.
The waves churn around me. The sky opens and the
thunder rolls, and I answer in wails of lament. And
all around me the world howls in fidelity to my
emptiness, and we fill the night with storms of our
despair.
My little boat drifts about on seven tenths, and
without you I will always be a fraction.
My little boat drifts and bobs, up and down it goes,
with so much above me and below me that I do not
know.
All around me the world is bound by rules. But for
you—for you there are none. For you, everything
parts and bends, everything obeys and acquiesces.
I am beginning to see that there really never was a
pattern. I made it all up. Beauty is random and
unexpected and cannot be contained. But I know I am
only briefly coming up for air, and shortly I will

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again be drowning in my delusions. I am in an
endless loop: above and below, above and below.
You are the dusk and the dawn. There is an hour that
begins to define your outline, but it holds you there
too briefly. It is all anticipation, forever unrequited.
But I saw you once, I think. A shaft of light made
visible by smoke or dust. I saw you, and I think you
noticed, and turned away before I could be sure. Why
do I chase you? Why do I incubate this darkness?

I take a book from my shelf. It is called The

Eroticism of the Senses. It was written by a woman
who spent only a single day each year outside of the
box she had placed herself in. Inside this box she
birthed a family. Inside this box she travelled oceans.
Within its small dimensions, she grew old and the
lines upon her face and hands were like canyons
carved by rivers over the history of the earth.

Outside my door the carpet is worn; matted and

discolored, a path is formed by thoughts of my
escape.

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I am moved by the smallest things. And I know you
feel this too. Are you not the one? Am I enamored by
a lie? You showed all the signs, gave me all the
symptoms. Perhaps everything repeats itself, and it is
only the repetition of forms that I am drawn to.
But I am succumbing to doubt and I cannot give in. I
turn the page in my little book and make the marks
that correspond to their movements.
Outside my window they follow the motion of my
pen. I will let them be for now. I will close my eyes
and disappear.

Everything until now has been nothing but a riddle,

and my mind feels addled and empty of answers. I
stand at the threshold, unable to enter, unable to
satisfy its keeper.

Outside the world hums. Outside the leaves rustle and

the stars burn. Outside the world feels us and braces
for the deluge. I breathe as little tornadoes form in the
far corners of the room. My mouth fills with your
breath, I taste a vision of you. Outside the world is
overcome. Outside the night weeps and the stars are
released from the sky.

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I look into you. I taste the faint saltiness at the soft
curve of your neck. You are luminous and impossibly
beautiful.
The sheets become waves, the waves become oceans.
There is only you. And your skin presses hard against
mine.
Outside the world is quiet. Outside the world is
consumed.

The water is frigid as you slip in. The world around

you is brittle, it shatters like glass. It is a façade, an
apparition. You break free as you break the plane.
You are released and a lightness overcomes you. The
anklets that bound you fall to the depths. The anklets
that bound you unweave and unravel.

I have forgotten the two of you. I have become too

lost in my own thoughts. What has become of you
both? I look through the envelopes stacked by the
door, unfold the notices, read the fine print. There is
nothing from you, no sign, no word. Where has the
time gone? What else have I forgotten, what has
become of the world outside my window. I hesitate to

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look, I court my denial to buy some time. My heart
races and even the footsteps from above can't calm
me. This may be the moment I have longed for but I
am not nearly as relieved or ready as I had imagined.
I walk to the door. I turn back to look at my little
room—the window, the counter, the fresh made bed. I
look at my empty chair, I think of the panic when
they realize there is no one at the controls. But this is
just the musings of my ego. They will always believe
they are in control, even as they plummet
uncontrollably to earth.
So, I turn the knob, listen for the clicking of the lock
signaling the end.

How many times have I woken from this dream? You

reassure me, kiss me lovingly on my forehead. You
clutch my hand, stroke my hair, tell me everything
will be alright.
And everything always is all right.

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I wash my face, wait for the coffee dripping slowly in
the pot. I hear you humming softly as you stretch and
roll on our freshly mussed bed. You tap on the
bathroom door, threaten playfully to burst in, "ready
or not" you say, giggling and tapping before falling
backwards again onto the bed. I pause and watch my
face in the mirror. Already I feel the joy retreating
against the darkness. Already I feel the spaces filling
with dread.
I want you to burst in, I want you to drive it away
with your lightness and your joy. Tell me it will be
alright, tell me.
I breathe in and a lifetime passes, I breath out and the
stars are born.
You stretch and roll upon among the rumpled sheets.
The clouds curl and grow—churn in the sky above.
They mirror your movements, billow with the
arching of your back. You breathe in tiny jet streams
and storms build on the soft surface of your tongue.
I wait in this little bathroom. I watch the darkness
paint the walls. I listen to your laughter and small
sounds of pleasure on the other side of the door. I
want you so badly but don't dare risk your seduction
by the darkness. I stand here waiting as the memory

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of you fades, I stand here waiting as the darkness
engulfs me.
We have a history of moonlight, you and I. You
named the moon with your very first words. And I
felt it, the moment the moon had a name. You on the
other side of the world, separated from me by years
and by oceans, you named it for the two of us,
claimed its light for you and me alone.
I knew before I knew you.
I knew the pace had quickened and that there was
another.
You come closer in the darkness, your face—full and
radiant like the moon. Our little room shimmers in
your silvery light. There is only us, and it seems the
whole history of the world was conceived solely to
fulfill this simple moment between us.

The story of the world is a love story.

We have a history that is tethered to the moon. We

have a history that is bathed in its shimmering light.

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You come closer in the darkness, your mouth, almost
my mouth, your breath, almost my breath.

We objectify everything and always. It is the essence

of our survival to name and catalogue. Anything else
would be too much. Too much beauty, too much
sadness, too much tragedy, too much suffering.

But I am the tragic evocation of beauty. I was born

weeping, my mother tells me. Not the wails of a babe
thrust into the world, but the plaintive lament of one
who has seen too much. I came into the world
swaddled in the suffering of others.
But...
There are moments when this wail subsides. And it
seems as if all of you are looking elsewhere. And in
this brief window of disconnect it occurs to me that I
could simply walk away. But my tears are oceans and
my howls are a tempest devouring the earth.
How do you have this hold on me? I hear your voice
and I am subdued to rapture. Everything I feel was
supposed to be less than what I am, but it is this
breathlessness, this want, that possesses me.

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You take me with your mouth, your eyes devouring
pleasure. I want to be consumed by you and you
comply with my desire.
I submit, and I become more powerful with this
submission...

They lied to take me, they lied to keep me. They said
your mouth was a fiction, your eyes, a mirage. And I
believed them, if only to stop the anguish and ache of
my desire for you.
The frequency of my thoughts of you rapidly
increase. You come in the rhythm of my heartbeat.
You flow in my blood, spread to my extremities. My
fingers curl to cup your breast, I reach for the space
that one day will contain you.

Everything that is more than the passing of days is

animated by your presence. But the space I occupy
does not contain you. You resist me to make me want
you more.
What do you want me to be? What will please you.
Are you repelled by my confession that I will be
anything you want me to be? My role is not to exert

131
my will but rather to satiate my desire. I am not less
because I submit, I would fail my purpose if I did not.
There is meaning inherent in nothing at all.
Everything is an empty cup. And I fill all my empty
cups with you. They overflow, they overwhelm me, I
will never have enough.

I have forgotten him. I have left him sitting on this

bench for what must have been lifetimes. But he did
not move, he didn't complain. He will wait as long as
it takes. He will wait until time engulfs him, will wait
until there is nothing but the emptiness left behind by
the emptiness. And still he will wait for her footsteps
to fall softly behind him, for her warm breath to
whisper the words he would wait forever to hear.
One day she will tell him she loves him. One day this
will all come to an end.
I cannot change the outcome but I can alter its course.
I can alter the course but I will never be forgiven.

There is also a different dream.

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And in this dream, I am awake, and know that I am.
In this dream everything is crisp and the vail that
typically shrouds me has fallen away, and I do not
turn back to retrieve it.
In this dream I do not look for you, and your absence
is a lightness I desperately embrace.
In this dream I do not want you. In this dream I do
not know longing, and I obey the seconds and the
minutes and the hours as they take me, as they
inevitably must take everyone.
In this dream, there was nothing far away and I
wanted only what was solid in my hands, wanted
only what was already mine.
In this new dream your eyes are all I see, they have
confiscated the space. Your eyes are black, black like
charcoal fostering embers. Your pupil is a period that
definitively ends a sentence, but opens the door for
another. I am locked here forever. I cannot escape the
gravity of your gaze. I slip into the whirlpool, flecks
of gold and glowing embers swirl about me. The
current takes me, the current pulls me under, makes
me dizzy, content, intoxicated.

133
The walls of my little room are gone. I sit in my chair
in the full vastness of this empty space. I do not have
the energy to do it all again. I am still in the dream
and I know that if I wake, I will wake with my arms
wrapped around you; our bodies pressed together in
the inexpressible desperation of our desire. I want
nothing more than to wake, but they want more from
me, they will always want more.
But what do we ever really want? What stands just
outside our reach that we fear to ask for, fear to
claim. This is my desire for you. I no longer imagine
you because you are right here within my reach.

How much more of this can you take? I could do this

forever. I could fill oceans with my words. But you
must be thinking: enough of this, will he ever just get
to the point, will he ever just decide?
And you are right to feel this way. But what if
deciding makes this all go away? What if I am
nothing but my anticipation, nothing but my fear?
Has your exasperation with me conquered your own
fear of the end? Maybe she feels as you do, maybe
she is tired of waiting as well, maybe her faraway
look is nothing but a passive and indifferent boredom
with her circumstance.

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I hold you all in suspense. I hold you all against your
will. I hold you all because I cannot decide.
Here is a synopsis of what you have read so far:
Shock
Fear
Wonder
Desolation
Tragedy
Longing
Desire
Delusion
Joy
Despair
Love
Sex
Beauty
Happiness
And loss.

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Oh, and there has been a woman. I see her now, on
the street below my window. Occasionally she will
look up, as if she is suddenly reminded of something
she has forgotten, though I don’t believe she sees me
watching.
It is time that I decide.
I make my bed, straighten the stack of letters by the
dresser. I listen to the footsteps of the little ones
above to steady myself to the rhythm of their
innocence. I brush crumbs from the creases in my
chair. I turn to look at my little room one last time. I
memorize the space, say goodbye to the future
fermenting beneath the furniture.
I turn to the window, take three steps and release
myself to the street below.
I fall,
I am falling.
Falling towards you,
falling to find you,
falling forever into the mysterious and beautiful
unknown.

136
 II

FOR YOU, ANYTHING

137
I walked into that still hot night. I walked from her
knowing that I hadn't offered a clear explanation or
reason for my departure. What I wanted to say was
that for me, love is like faith, like religion. I know
why people talk to god, why they construct heaven
and hell. I understand the impulse and the need, but I
don't believe. My need is satisfied and consecrated in
a glance. I wanted to say that I have taken my vows,
discarded the flesh for the holy and ineffable call of
inconsolable desire.
I walk through the darkness, watch my reflection pass
in the shop windows. We watch each other, my
reflection and me. I want to be like that; there but not
there, real but not real.

138
And really, this is how I have lived for the last two
years, since I learned of my ability to inflict revenge,
since I learned of my lust for the process. I would
like to believe it is justice I am after but I get too
close, it satisfies a need, something I can no longer
live without.
I won't go into it too deeply except to say that I
wished it, and eventually, the wish came true. But
there are no wishes that just come true, just as there
are no prayers that are ever answered without
condition.
I read somewhere, that when a cat delivers to you a
lifeless bird, lays it at your feet, a kill carried out just
for you; that it is, for that animal, the highest
expression of devotion. My life is a bit like that. You
will be moved or you will be horrified, I have no
control over which.
It began unexpectedly—my mother in the hospital. A
mild stroke, nothing major, a full recovery in a week
or two, I was told. One of her nurses—the one
assigned to her in the overnight, when the halls are
dark and the sickness seems to roam
unabated—seemed preoccupied. She was pretty,
maybe twenty-six or twenty-seven. We talked a bit
when my mother was first admitted. I told her I

139
was..., waited for that flicker of desire that usually
appeared in the eyes of the women I met. And during
the week my mother was there, this nurse offered me
coffee and brought me donuts from the box behind
the nurses' station.

It happened on the final day of my mother’s stay. As I

packed up my mother's things and quizzed her on her
faculties, she mentioned in passing that my pretty
nurse who fussed over me and saw to my comfort
and emotional well-being, had, after I would leave
for the night, regularly neglected to do the same for
my mother. I had a brief, passing thought, that she
should feel what my mother felt. And there it
happened, right in front of me, in front of the doctors
and my mother and a handful of visitors loitering in
the hallway. My pretty nurse drooped to one side then
buckled under the weight of her own body. She hit
the floor like a piece of meat released from a hook in
a butchers' shop.
Poor girl, who would live out her days slumped in a
chair, drooling and unable to articulate her desires.
I couldn't help but to be shocked and horrified by this
coincidence, and I even entertained the thought of

140
some divine cause and effect, but I do not believe in
such things, not then, and not now.
There was no indication that something like this
would happen again. It became only a story I would
tell when the conversation lagged or I was trying to
impress someone who tended to make connections
where none exist.
But it was little things that began to add up. I could
no longer deny that somehow my thoughts were
being translated into action. But I just watched, didn't
lift a finger. And I never had a moment of remorse. It
was simply a process of retribution, a balance, an
answer to a question, a reaction to an action.
You reap what you sow,
an eye for an eye...
I was in good company, for all who would judge me.
But this is not all that I am, even now as I try to
become invisible.

I paint images of justice and revenge. They are

horrific and I can barely look at them once they are
complete.

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I do this believing that it will relieve some pressure;
so that I can be less careful with my judgements, less
fearful that my thoughts will have consequences.

After I have walked all night, trying to fade into the

darkness, I am relieved and calmed when dawn
finally comes. It feels as if everyone is safe. Dusk is
the opposite, it is the most precarious time, it is when
the world assesses its inhabitants and none of us can
escape the outcome of this tally. But, really, no time
is any different from another. The repercussion of day
is night, and of night is day. That is all. And this
cycle will not stop repeating until long after I have
finished.
Over time, I became insatiable. But I am getting
ahead of myself,
I want to confess everything but I am not quite there.
Before all this all began, I absorbed suffering, but I
did not cause it. And before I realized that had
changed, I still thought I was saving you from it.
I am obsessive; little things that would simply pass
for others grip me and steal my focus from other

142
things. I play out every scenario, I recreate every
outcome. So, when I thought I could control the
result, I jumped at the opportunity.

Love is like religion. God is a mouth, a breast, a

triangle of darkness. But those are just symbols,
icons, rituals. The transcendent exists only
in your eyes,
your touch,
your breathless sighs.

I am not a believer, but I believe in this.

And in this I am a true believer, a zealot, a crusader.
I was chosen to distribute the justice that others
wouldn’t. It wasn't what I wanted. It wasn't my
choice.
But really, I wasn't chosen. It is simply a facility
unique to my make-up. We are all anomalies built on
a common structure. I could end the suffering if the
burden was too great, but it is not. I like this role, I

143
was born for it. I know that evil holds my right hand
and justice holds my left.

We were in love but I could not reach you. You lived

within a distance and I was never enough to lead you
home. I know you didn't want this and so, I suffered
the burden of your sadness, absorbed the pain you
must have felt. But I could never name it, I could
never hold it still long enough to subdue it.
And then slowly it became clear to me why you were
the way you were. And I saw a pathway clearing my
way to you.

I keep a low profile, I try to blend in. I hold a menial

job and put my mind to sleep when I work. I go
through the motions. This is my meditation, my
escape.

I seek refuge from what I crave, I seek refuge from

my dark heart.

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I divine weakness, I uncover secrets; it is a gift. I will
sense even a trickle, flowing deep beneath the
surface. If it is there, I will find it. And it is always
there to be found.
You all fear something monstrous lurking inside you.
It lies hidden and sleeping in the deepest, darkest part
of you. And if it is awakened, if it is coaxed in just
the right way, it will devour you.

The second time it happened...

First, though, I must establish that there are people

who deserve what I facilitate. And if you believe in
the divinity of my gift, then this is justice bound by
morality. I have no issues with this assessment. But
for me, it is more about the pleasure derived from the
aesthetics of retribution. It is a balance, and the right
thing to do, if only just because of that.
I don't trust those who forgive. I think there is
something dead already inside them.
I will tell you of the second incident eventually, but I
am getting sidetracked and I have more to say before
I get to that.

145
This is my confession. I know justice is coming for
me as well. It is all a great big circle.
I have almost closed it, but not quite. There is one
more thing I have to do.

I loved you, even as you stood there—how many

times was it? —with your fists full of kitchen knives
pressed to your belly. I loved you as you mimicked
your demise, loved you as you looked through me,
discarded me, abandoned me to the terror and
helplessness of this vision. I loved you but I could not
reach you as your demons cemented themselves
within the sadness and torment of your darkness.

But eventually, I could not live within the shadow of

your sorrow.

It took so little to escape, to be anywhere other than

there. I dropped my memories somewhere over the
ocean, became someone else at 40,000 feet. Now I
walk, encumbered by nothing. It is so different here.
How quickly my life has changed, how quickly my
world has transformed and been replaced by another.

146
I walk past cathedrals, rivers, cafes. I overhear
conversations in language I don't understand, as
strange and indecipherable as the singing and
chirping of the birds in the trees that line the streets I
walk. I am overcome by sensation. Smells and
sounds wash through me. I am becoming someone
new. I rush to a shop window to see my reflection but
I can't find my face among all the others reflected
there. I have disappeared now, finally, even from
myself. I enter the café. Buy a coffee. I sit but I can't
stay still. I want to watch but I am drawn more
powerfully into the night. I feel desire building inside
me but it is different from the desire I left behind.

I watch her. I have watched her for three days now. I

Followed her to where she sleeps. I am watching her
eat breakfast. I would be thinking the same thing you
are but it isn't true. It is just that she brings me
comfort. I am suffering the spaces that aren't yet
filled. I need something beautiful to soften the
urgency and fear that comes with being reborn. I
would like for her to look at me, acknowledge and
consent to the game I am playing. I am beginning to
feel regret that I came here, regret that I can't go
back. She helps me fill in the spaces of this new life.
Perhaps one day she and I will sit together and laugh

147
at the memory of when I used to watch her, before we
met and fell in love. I would like to fill the space with
that thought and the possibility helps me push away
regret.

I walk. These sidewalks are longer than what I am

used to. Even the space between spaces seems
strange. I know I am somewhere else. I am far from
home, I am not confused about that. I know how I got
here, I remember the flight, the airports, the taxis. I
remember the stewardess bringing me extra drinks
because I made her laugh, telling her stories while the
other passengers slept. For a few quiet hours it was
just the two of us, her and me, and I think I may have
loved her just a little bit.
I am susceptible to falling in love. It is an affliction, a
desperate act. I fall in love and am already running
from it as I imagine the ache of its loss. I am a
disappointment, and I know I can be nothing else,
though I want to be more, if only just once. And I felt
this as I walked off the plane. She looks at me as if to
tell me to wait, to take a chance on a kiss or a life, or
a night together in a city in which we both are
strangers. But I do not wait, and I do not look back.

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I walk. I don't know why I came here, but now I only
look for her. I can't remember why I came. In my
hotel room I searched my luggage, looking for
anything that might remind me. It seems only that I
packed in a rush. My past becomes foggy, I need to
sit down. I find a bench in a park. I stare at a
cathedral, am humbled and crushed by its history. I
feel oppressed by its presence. My head throbs, I am
unfamiliar with this feeling. Are you still here, or are
you already flying, above me and away from me, to a
different city, with a different man telling you
different stories as my world unravels below you, in
the shadow of god's domain.
I sit on this bench in the shadow of god. I sit on my
bench as a man passes. His eyes catch mine, he has
pulled mine to his, willfully, I think. He lifts his hand
and points behind me. I look puzzled. He looks at me
harder to see if I am paying attention. “Are you
looking for the girl?” He says, then turns, and
continues walking. I am not sure if he simply walked
by and I imagined the rest, but still, I look to see
where he is pointing.
What I see behind me is another large building. It is
probably as old as the cathedral. The shadow it casts
is not divine but it is long and thick and somewhat
daunting. I wade through it and it feels like tar. It

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impedes my progress and I am getting tired and want
to sit down, but I am closer to the building now than I
am to my bench.
I make it, finally, to my destination, and in the time it
took to get from my bench to this spot, I have
stopped questioning why I am here. And while this
place still feels foreign, it is a strangeness that now
seems to suit me. By now, I have forgotten about the
girl. I try to forget other things that are not important.
Perhaps anything is better than what I am running
from. I have deciphered that much. But I have left
something behind that maybe wasn’t in my best
interest to abandon or neglect.
I know that I am killing time, avoiding what I have
forgotten, but I am nonetheless enamored by you. I
should have lingered on your face a little longer,
rendered a clearer image of you in my mind. But I am
left to go on just the faintest outline of your features
that change with my mood, or the stimuli of my
surroundings, or mix and dissipate in the growing
anxiety of my situation.
I realize I am more interested in the shadows cast by
things than by the things themselves. My world is
only gradations of gray to black. I live in a world of
projections. I only respond to the shadows, I am

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always looking down. But you are not a shadow, nor
do you cast one because no dark thing could mimic
you. You are the first real thing I have ever desired,
and yet, I cannot even locate you in this place you
called me to.

I had to leave where I was before. I had to leave

because I was beginning to see things before they
happened.
I write this because I have lost god. I looked away for
only a moment and he was gone.
Why should people suffer? I thought we had an
understanding, that I would take responsibility for the
darkness and in return, you would pacify my
yearning for justice without consequence or debt.
Every word I speak is a fiction, everything I believe,
a delusion.

My wife was a beautiful tragedy. She is no longer my

wife and she is no longer tragic, though she is still
beautiful, and birds still gather around her. Her
sadness used to fill the night. It would radiate out
from the place she sat and the creatures who woke

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when others slept would weep and roam the night
with her sadness clutched to their hearts.
It was evil that brought us together. She felt it coming
for her and I knew how to keep it at bay. She felt the
walls closing in and the hot breath of demons
searching for her in the quiet terror of the descending
night. She called me once, as I drifted to sleep and I
already knew before I answered what was coming for
her.
And so, we drove, deep into that terrifying night, and
we felt them, scouring the city for any scent of her.
She was mine to protect, mine to shield from the grip
of evil. And they whispered in my ear, tried to
negotiate for just a sliver of her soul, for just a
moment when I would agree to look away. But I
would never give in, and I endured the blows I
suffered for my refusal.

I believe that my life parallels another’s.

But I think he is good, and I, certainly, am not.
I roam the night absorbing evil, leaving him to his
musings on love and god and meaning.

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I am resentful, though this is my role, and there is no
escaping it. I have no space or energy to ponder the
meaning of it all or to waste my time imagining that I
will be rewarded for my fidelity. I am part of a vast
and indifferent machinery, I am sure. And though I
am integral to its operation, any hope for redemption
is as foolish as the pistons firing in the engine of my
car, hoping for the same.
I try to escape my fate. It is the reason I watch her; to
escape into the lullaby of a stranger’s movements. I
watch her but I don’t want to know her, don’t want to
know who has wronged her or caused her pain.
My revenge now is limited to the swatting of flies,
and they always have it coming, always deserving of
their fate.
When my wife was my wife, I was a sheath
shrouding a brittle sword.
Does how we love mitigate our crimes, our sins? I
read somewhere, once, that god cannot judge us for
what we love. I wonder if this is true, I hope that it is
because deep down I want this all to be for
something.
I carry around a tattered book. It is the book that
contains that line about god and love and judgement.

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Most of what is in it I don’t understand, or can’t
follow at any rate.
But here is the one thing I know for sure. When we
find something beautiful, we should hold it in our
hands, and if it bites us, if it digs its teeth deep into
our flesh, we must resist the urge to crush it in our
fists. Because those things that are beautiful, are
terrifying little beasts, and that terror is what
amplifies and animates their beauty. If you hold
beauty in your hands you must tame it, and turn its
teeth on someone else.

Again, I am sitting, slumped on this bench in the

shadows. I am leaving my body. I decided to try it on
a whim, and so, to clear my mind, I focus on a man
awkwardly attempting to remove a clump of gum
from his shoe. I ease my way out of my skin, trying
not to disturb our stupefied interest in the drama
unfolding before us. I try not to disturb my body as I
slip away and I doubt it will even miss me if I never
return.
I wriggle out from within our skin. The air feels
different, like the slight cold sting of salt that clings
to my skin when I emerge from the ocean. I stop to
get my bearings, turn to look at you/me/us, to fully

154
absorb what is happening. I look to see if there is
something holding me to you; a ribbon, a rope, a
sliver of light, but there is nothing, I simply stand up
and walk away, as if the guards have inexplicably
abandoned their posts.
Where am I? I am simply here, somewhere between
myself, my body, and the cathedral.
How many times have I stood in this place, or is this
the first? Questions confound and haunt me. I am
desperate for answers, yet I run from the slightest
indication that any exist.
I am trying to get back to my story. I feel I need to
tell you everything, but I am drawn back to this
memory and can’t seem to extricate myself. Please
bear with me, please keep me in your sights.
It’s a wonder I came back at all. It surprises me that I
didn’t take that opportunity to disappear forever, after
all, this is what I told myself I wanted; what I still tell
myself.
From this untethered place, I see things more clearly.
I see that I never was a victim after all, in any of it. I
chose to act and found pleasure in it. It was the guilt
that came out of this pleasure that caused me to want

155
to release my soul from responsibility, and blame
some mechanism that had me in its grasp.
But really, this mechanism was woven into my body.
I am man and machine. I was gifted; an anomaly.
The machinery that ran beneath my muscles, that
charged the process of my mind, was sparked by god,
or so I imagine. I am a tool—to engage in what he
doesn’t have the stomach for. He is benevolent and
forgiving but he also has an ease of looking the other
way, to let men like me do what we are unable to
resist.
I am not chosen; I have no delusions that I won’t be
punished for this. It is the way it is, an unspoken
contract to act on my dark desires. But I am not only
what this implies. My rage is fueled by my anguish.
My desire for revenge is not for me. On the surface, I
am ambivalent; I am not so clear on the difference or
identification of good and evil. I am only animated
by the pain I feel for the wrongs done to those I love
or even for those I pity. My heart overflows but was
diverted to the pit rather than the garden. I will dig
two graves as Confucius instructed.
Our world is getting bigger. We see beyond the
planets, beyond the solar system, beyond the stars.
We see into the vastness that was once only fodder

156
for our mythology and our fears. But now the
unknown is becoming known, and the conquest of
mystery is within our reach, and yet, our greatest
conflict and obsession is still within ourselves.
I have done terrible things.
And nothing about my story is unique.
I am like scores of others with dark thoughts and
justifications. My skin is a sarcophagus trying to
contain my vengefulness. My skin creates an illusion
of civility; a costume that grants me entrance to the
world of others.
But what now? Now that I am no longer shrouded in
this lie? I have escaped my body, simply walked
away. What am I bound by, what can possibly temper
my urges?
I once got lost in a fantasy; a version of reality in
which I was part of a pattern, something beautiful,
and rich, with purpose and meaning. I let myself be
carried away with the thought that I was being
watched, guided to the one who would love me,
guided to the one who would not need me to access
my darkness. But this is a fantasy, fabricated by the
weakness of my mind. There is no one who will love
me without that condition.

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But I can’t blame them. They don’t know that this is
what they are responding to. They don’t know what
they are needing of me. The attraction is a
foreboding, an omen, a portent.
But I went willingly, I always went willingly. If each
time I thought it would go differently, it was only my
naiveté briefly protecting me from the inevitable.
But why does any of this matter? Once anything was
done, did it even make a difference? I am a man
driven by emotion, I am all reaction, all cause and
effect.
I step into the darkness.
You and I were complicated and doomed and I
refused to say a thing. I ran beneath you holding a
net. I’d break your fall, then hoist you on my
shoulders. Over and over this was our story. Over
and over, this was our fate.
It was not a burden. I felt relieved being tasked with a
purpose. It didn’t matter that I did not understand, it
did not matter that I had no control. I flowed in the
river of my fate, I flowed in the river of your
dependency.
Would we, you and I, know any freedom beyond this
intertwining of our fates? I ponder this as I float

158
above the damp lawn leading to the spires and
buttresses in front of (before) me. Is this freedom I
am feeling? I do feel released from the bounds of my
body; I feel weightless and unencumbered by gravity
and worry, but still, I feel the pulsing of your
disquiet. You hold me at a distance yet you grip me
tight. Why won’t you let me go, or rather, why won’t
the one who occupies this house I am moving
towards, allow you to set me free.
I am heading for a confrontation, I am looking for a
fight.
I enter the cathedral; I enter his domain. I hope that I
am not dreaming, that I am not imagining this respite
from my body. I want to enter unannounced, without
a scent, without a sound, because I know his senses
are heightened and refined.
I move down the aisle, toward your static
doppelganger suspended stoically before me. But
there is sadness in the eyes, a resignation. I suppose
the weight of the inevitable is too great even for you;
even for you who set it all in motion. Were you not
aware of what you had done? Had you not planned
and prepared for every possible outcome? I am
confused and angry. I want to scream, but without my
body, I cannot make a sound. And your twin just

159
dangles there, casting his eyes downward, in a
perpetual state of shameful compliance.
Do you know what love is? though you won’t look at
me, I will tell you anyway. Those thorns you wear,
that crown, that halo of sticks; it is just a decoration;
an indulgence. You left this world in solitude and
indifference. Everyone’s story was really just your
own and you feign love but crave only adoration. I
understand, I really do, but I am just a man, and a
confused and fragile one at that. I am built of
weakness and temptation. You say that you are more
than a man, that you are more than me. But, for me,
there are no actors, no supporting cast following a
script; no one lifting my robes as I wade through the
mud and muck of my life.
But I have loved; I have ached and sacrificed. I have
walked into the storm, run into the fire. I have
gripped my sword and dug myself in as the armies
charged towards me. And I will never know how to
do otherwise.
I am here. I am standing before you. I know you see
me, if you see everything. What if I give in, agree to
your terms, indulge your divinity? What can you give
me? I have no patience to study the nuances of your
sanctity, I cannot conjure a single sliver of faith for

160
what tells me only to doubt. This is your one chance,
your single opportunity to save me.
I scan my surroundings. I watch the priest walk
towards me. I watch his lips move. They twitch,
slightly, side to side, up and down. I am not sure if he
is chewing or muttering to himself. He walks straight
up to me, stops, turns to face the mute figure
towering above us.
He can’t see me, but I think he feels me here. He
prays to the figure, implores it to rid this space of the
presence of evil. I watch as small beads of sweat
form at his temple, like raindrops poised to fall from
heaven; to extinguish the fires of hell. He is shaking
slightly. He is aware that something is not quite right.
I look back at the lowered face of the figure above us,
catch his eyes looking coyly in my direction. I want
to tear him from his perch, punch him in the gut,
reopen his wounds; but he knows me, he is in on the
folly of it all. Even my violence seems pointless
under his knowing gaze.
And I find myself chanting a familiar phrase, over
and over again in my head...
for you, anything...
And it is always like this.

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And this is always the moment I dread, but like all
the other moments like it, I can, and will, do nothing
to change my course.
I think about my body, back on that bench, I think
about the distance; and if that shell has found a new,
happier life without me.
I look again at the priest standing next to me. I am
overcome with compassion for him, empathy even; I
think that he is struggling, that he knows that I am
here and fears that this statue—this effigy of his
hope; his savior, protector, god—will not, or cannot
do anything to relieve him of the burden of this
knowing.
It is not that I am evil, but I have been stained or
marked with the brand of ownership. I have been
claimed, forced into service. I did not sell my soul; it
was offered up without my consent.
There is no story of our lives, no tidy or compact
narrative. The linear is all a fabrication after the fact.
We start, we stop, we start again. We are released
from one fiction, and fall into another.
We are all, always and forever, in a state of falling;
this is the one truth I will take away from this life. It

162
is comical, or it is tragic, but mostly it just is this
way.
And this priest here is falling too; he is falling just
now, and he has a subtle sense that he is. I do not read
his mind but I am reading the puzzlement on his face;
the realization that this statue will forever just hang
there; mute, passive; without answers, without
empathy, without a care in the world.
So, he must take this on himself, and in the moment
of this realization, his senses become more acute and
he turns his head in my direction, and looks firmly
into my eyes.
My cover is blown, my anonymity lost. I have
become visible, if only to him. I am the enemy, the
demon, the unwelcome visitor, trespassing in this
kingdom of the saved.
But I am a dupe, a tool, a puppet; an unwitting
conspirator; fodder for those anointed to a cause I
wanted no part of.

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...I remember the day we met, how you smiled at me;
turning to see if I was still watching as you walked to
your car. And I was still watching, and I think from
that moment, I never stopped. But over time your
smile grew darker and the joy that once possessed the
arc of your mouth was replaced by a deep and
unrelenting sadness. But I never stopped watching,
though my view was veiled by the tears that filled my
eyes with the anguish of your suffering. This is how
it began, this is how they marked me; using my tears
and my growing helplessness to solicit my
compliance. And maybe I was grateful, maybe it
saved me, and saved you too. But I have been served
with the consequences, while you have been released
and set free...

And so, now...

There is no doubt, this priest sees me, sees my mark;
he believes he is standing in his moment of purpose. I
want to say something; to plead my case and clarify
my situation. But I say nothing, I just stare back. And
in spite of my discomfort, I accept my fate and brace
myself for the onslaught.

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What will he do? How will he take action? I am as
curious as I am anxious. My fate and his; in this
moment, so thoroughly, and fundamentally, entwined.
Our statue watches us both. He seems giddy with
anticipation. The space fills with foreboding. I half
expect that If I turn, I will see the pews have filled
with fevered parishioners and the simply curious;
eager to be witnesses to this spectacle.
But it is just the three of us, yet I am still, and
comically outnumbered. I am happy to submit but I
know that will not do. All this talk of redemption and
paradise is born and consecrated in blood, and that is
what should be expected here as well.
I wait for him to do something. I am unprepared, and
nothing is happening. I am feeling more and more
uncomfortable standing here before him.
He just stares at me, I know he is unprepared too, but
he is inflamed by mission and passion and I have no
such emotions animating me.
My anxiety is replaced by discomfort. I feel
increasingly ill-equipped to deal with this and I am
beginning to miss my body back there on that bench.
If I could do it all again, I would, or I would do
everything different. But it would make no

165
difference, because as I stand here staring into this
priest’s churning eyes, I realize everything would
have led me here to this moment no matter what.
So, I am split between body and spirit. I understand
you now, hanging there for all eternity; your body
forever estranged. Is our adoration enough to
complete you? Is it enough to make all your suffering
worthwhile?
I think that I am stalling. I see fear welling in his eyes
and I expect that fear soon will be replaced by fire.
This priest, who woke imagining just another day of
prayer, another day tending to his flock, now stands
here facing evil; facing me down beneath the giddy
judgement of his savior. And I should put up a fight,
though faced with this I feel more inclined to beg his
forgiveness—then slither out to rejoin my body,
thrilled to be back in the ease and comfort of my
melancholy.

“Be gone!”

I am startled by these first words. It is not at all what

I expected. I thought we would engage, assume a
commonality, recognize the dialectical nature of this

166
encounter. I presumed a certain reverence for the
significance of this event or at least a reluctant
respect for that thing that has, for millennia, acted in
direct and vital opposition to his faith.
But this man’s behavior is not in line with this odd
fantasy I have been constructing to make it through
this encounter.
I am not up for this. I rush out, escape the way I
came. I am gone, as he had commanded; I leave him
to froth and burn and revel in his victory, as he falls
to his knees, and laughter rises from the belly of his
savior to the rafters.

Really, what becomes of any of this? How can we

know anything at all? I search for my body, but it is
no longer where I left it. The bench we were sitting
on is occupied now by two young girls eating apples.
They are laughing and taking pictures with their
phones. I try to conjure a sense of panic; I think that
is what I should be feeling, but I am feeling only
apathy. But even that is too strong a word. Really, I
feel nothing. I am not even numb; numbness implies
an awareness of something that was once there, once
felt, but is no longer.

167
This is how I feel about you.

Though, it is possible I was wrong about everything.

Though it is possible that I am imagining it all.
There is a book. I carry it with me everywhere. It was
given to me by a stranger. He insisted that I take it.
The cover and some pages have been torn away so I
don’t know the title, I don’t know the author. It is
creased and tattered. I have read it forwards and back,
read randomly from the middle out, and memorized
its contents.
Sometimes I imagine, rather, I feel, that I am being
coaxed; lured to a path, a pattern, as if the world is a
mirror and there is another, always mimicking my
movements until we find our way to each other.
But surely, this is just a fairytale, and the book I
carry, just a fiction. It doesn’t claim to be anything
else, though possibly it made such a claim in the
pages that are missing.

168
At any rate, I live a subconsciously parallel life in
which I brim with hope and possibility. Sometimes, I
imagine myself rising up through the clouds, past the
atmosphere, beyond the stratosphere; until I am
weightless and drifting through endless space. I turn
to see the earth below, crisscrossed by brilliant
ribbons of light; all of them linking one person to
another. And I see the ribbons that link me to you;
see the history of their movements and the mirrored
patterns they create. I see the arc of their story, see
the future in the symmetry...I see only trails of light
but I know the one that glows brightest is trailing
from you. And the two of us are looped and knotted,
forever and ever in this fairytale of glowing bliss.
I want to believe this, but there is no ribbon of light
trailing from me now. I left it behind with my flesh
and my bones. So how will I find my way to you
now?
I want to believe what is written in this book.
But this book is full of lies, it pulls me in, fills me
with hope, then abandons me to the empty pages that
make up my life. If there was even one truth to be
found, one thing that could have helped me get to
you; a key, a pick, a hammer...anything. But the
words do not offer any such means to open the doors

169
that separated you from me, nor do they illuminate
the darkness; they simply magnify what is already
bathed in light.
So, I absorb it all, because you cannot.
My world is built on disenchantment.
My life is defined by what it is not.
And what it is not, grips me and pulls me under,
makes me gasp for air...
I once saw an image of your eyes.
I saw their wispy analogue in the circle of the sun;
shrouded and glowing behind the languid smoke that
rose from the fires raging at the fringes of my city.
Your eyes induce me to silence.
They are oceans—of red iron oxide and carbon black.
They are my weakness,
They are my undoing.

But I am wrong to be undone by something so quaint

as the enchantment of your eyes. Love has become

170
more complex than this and I am still stuck in the
provincialism of my infatuation.

It has been three weeks since I last saw you, my

body. Occasionally, I think I see you, walking ahead
of me on the sidewalk, or on the television; in the
crowd at a sporting event, as the camera pans by. The
likely truth is that you are lying, face down, in the
darkness of an alley, or the bottom of a lake. Or you
are already in the ground; a number, or a “here lies
John Doe...” marking the final destination of my
flesh.
I don’t expect to be reunited with you. This surely is
my punishment; my fate for all my crimes and
transgressions, and my lack of remorse.
I took the leap and cannot return, but I am tempted to
go back to face my judgement. And I imagine that
priest is still kneeling there, locked in place, in the
same spot I left him; his eyes blazing and mouth
agape, laughter still echoing through the spaces.
But I won’t go back, I am beyond judgement, already
forgotten.

171
I am gone, finally; invisible. I wonder if even you can
see me. I move freely, unnoticed. If I wanted to, I
could help myself to money from open registers, or
peek under women’s skirts or watch them undress
through the slivered space between the curtains of
their bedroom windows. I could listen in on
conversations or smell the perfume at the neck of a
pretty girl. Or I could follow you home, stand at the
foot of your bed and watch you as you are sleeping.
But I don’t do any of these things because I am not,
essentially, a bad person. My crimes are limited to
one specific thing, and in that specific area, I am, and
was, a very bad man.
I should attempt to embrace the full magnitude of my
predicament, but I am stuck in the simple curiosity
and exploration of my unexpected independence.
This freedom is a trap, I know. But I feel helpless
before the temptation, it is like the drink before the
hangover, the inhibition before the fall.

Every time I tell this story, each time I get to this part,
I am surprised by how I got here. Sometimes, by this
point I have managed to stay on a linear path, so that
my listener has managed to follow along and get a

172
clear picture of my life; understanding the reasons I
am saying any of this. But other times, like now, I
have meandered and strayed so far from the point,
that even I have forgotten what any of this really
means. At times, her face remains so crisp and vivid
in my mind, and even for my listener, she appears
almost just as she was as my words build a picture of
our life. But this time, even for me, her image is hazy
and barely there, and I wonder again if I am making
the whole thing up.
So, maybe my story is no longer relevant, if ever it
even was. What am I left with? She moved on long
ago and my sacrifice has been rewritten in her
mythology as a threat, a mistake, an unfortunate
brush with a man in the process of becoming
unhinged.

We can change everything at will.

This is what I have done.
I cannot reverse it.
I am afraid I did not think it through.

173
I have decided to skip the rest of my story, there is
not much more to say and I have finally gotten bored
of telling it. It is true I was coming unhinged—that
day—when she saw me as a threat, that day when her
eyes became empty when she looked at me. That day
I lost my grip and reality spiraled, irreversibly, away
from me.
I think I finally understand, I have finally woken up. I
was always disconnected. I was a ghost, an invisible
man cloaked in flesh but fully unfit to be seen, much
less touched. I blamed you, but it was me, all along
who was at fault.
I am slowly becoming unbound from the old rules of
confinement to my body. I no longer need to traverse
space or measure distance, I simply think of where I
want to be, and I am there. I have lost the pleasure of
eating or drinking, or feeling the sensation of any
variation of temperature or pressure upon my skin. I
can still see, somehow, and I can recall accurately
enough, a memory or a scent or the way something
felt in my hands. I still experience something of an
analogy of the senses.
Without a body, I have difficulty recalling the vanity
that animated my fantasies of vengeance. And I think
my way back to the cathedral and the priest still

174
kneels there, frozen in his moment of defiance. The
space is otherwise empty, even of the laughter that
previously filled it. I look up at the statue, and it too
seems vacant. You have abandoned this priest to his
futility, because you know, and you will not tell him,
that evil cannot be banished, nor can it be unwoven
from good. This is your knot, your tangle, your
mirror, your fate. There is something bigger even,
than you. A plan that will not initiate you to its
purpose. All the world is mise en abyme. We are but a
moment in the beautiful miracle of randomness;
infinitely reflected, endlessly returned.
I realize that this would appear to be a paradox—the
universe being simultaneously destined and
random—and perhaps it is, I can’t explain it. There is
so much I just don’t know.
What do these motes of dust drifting through the
sunlight think? Why is it wrong to imagine they have
an opinion? They are, no doubt, much freer than me.
Perhaps they have evolved to this liberty through
hard work and deliberation. Who am I to say? Maybe
I am on the vanguard of human evolution; having
shed my body, free to ponder on things such as this.

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I certainly have much in common with the dust. We
all just drift with the current, illuminated now and
again, but mostly invisible, and light as air.

I feel the knot loosening.

Everything I was tethered to is falling away.
There is no pattern, no plan.
It was all a fantasy whose origin was mine alone.
I see, finally, that there is no time, no straight path
from one thing to another. What I have learned, this
miracle of recognition, is that nothing is anything but
what it is; unrelated to, and responsible for nothing
other than itself.
I am finally free—from my body, from my fate, from
everything. You exist for me now simply as I choose
to remember you. And if I choose to forget; you will
simply cease to be.

And this is a revelation.

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And this is a relief.

To be finally free,

to believe nothing at all.

III

ALL THE THINGS I WILL BUILD FOR HER

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I have dreams: of being estranged from my body—
liberated, separated, released—of wandering,
unencumbered by flesh or by gravity.
There is lightness and a relief from the urgency of my
search for her. But I only, and always, wake in a
panic. What would I do if I could not touch her when
I find her? How could I bear the injustice of that? I
can’t accept that even you could be so cruel...
But I apologize for my insolence, it is only because
of you that I am here at all.

I know you are there, watching me. Though I get the

sense—I can’t shake the feeling—that you do not
have my best interests in mind.

You watch me; you are there or you are not, I am

ambivalent. No, that is not true, I would rather you

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didn’t watch; I am not lonely, I prefer my solitude. I
think and dream only of her, I draw pictures in my
notebooks of all the things I will build for her...

But, know also that I watch you too. I look out into
the dark vastness of space, and I know that you are
there, hiding in the black void between stars. I am not
the innocent you think I am, I am not so naïve to your
nudges and manipulation. You are always, and you
are everywhere; but I know, that in reality, you are
smaller than me.

I imagine you are little more than a man holed up in a

tiny room, with perhaps a single window through
which you view the world, and some old furniture
with empty drawers, and stacks of unopened mail
strewn about the floor.

Unlike you, my motives are clear—I seek only the

one I love. I listen to her voice, softly in my ear,
beckoning me to find her.

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I know that you envy me for this simplicity.

I wonder if you will ever have that. I wonder if you

rested too soon, if you should have created something
for yourself as well, someone to take care of you
when you find yourself alone.

I am sorry I can’t be that for you, though I do feel

you there, and have a growing pity and sadness for
what you are about to lose.

When I was a child, I was awakened in the night by

angels, whispering for me to follow. But I did not
follow because I heard her calling more urgently in
my ear. And as her voice filled my head, the angels
shed their light and a blacker darkness filled the
room. And I saw that they were dark as much as they
were light. And I know they could not help it; I know
it is their nature. Their inability to choose one over
the other is why they will always envy us. I did not
let them take me, I howled and screamed until my
mother came and turned on the light. And with the
flick of that switch, the angels disappeared and never
returned.

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I didn’t let them take me but I suspect that you did,
and because of that, I know my will is more powerful
than yours.

Did you bring me to life? Did you animate in me this

very will that now defies you?
My gratitude is overflowing but these are words for
you only. My will exceeds my gratitude. You are
enamored by her; in love with what you created. But
with that same breath you also made me. I slipped
into being, unannounced. You did not intend me, and
in the absence of your gaze, in your abandonment
and forgetfulness; I exceeded you.

I have what you do not. I have what you never will. I

am entwined with her. It is my face, my voice, my
scent that lies just outside the perimeter of her
memory. It is what calls her. I am a mirror of her, and
she of me. We loop and intertwine until we are pulled
together in an eternal knot. It is our destiny and you
cannot make it un-so.

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This just is—always and even before you. You made
us, but you did not make this. My will was intact in
even the smallest possibility of me, and in her as
well. Why did you not know this? Why did you not
know you had no sway here?
Why do you not know this? Why do you not respond
when I call to you for answers? You try to hide, but
you are everywhere. Have you even forgotten who
you are? Have you become so lost in your obsession
that you are blind even to that?
I should thank you for opening my eyes. I should be
grateful for the destruction of my innocence so early
into my experience of it. It did not leave me jaded or
enslaved to those things which normally move in to
supplant its loss. Instead, that space was filled with
my expanding and awakening will, it grew and
overflowed into that emptiness, and gave me a clarity
that allowed me to see you for what you really are.
The gods are needier than men.
They are petty and jealous, and easily rattled.
And you are no different from any of them.

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Each day, I follow the same path. I sit on the same
benches, enter the same shops. I draw images in my
notebook, fill the pages with the geometry of our
future. Each morning I realign myself to the pattern.
Each morning I prepare myself to find her.
I think you believe you are changing my path, and
perhaps I cannot differentiate between your whims
and my own. I might alter my course at your
direction, unaware that I am not following my own
impulse. But everything corrects itself, always, and
the map is recalculated, redrawn. There are infinite
routes to the same destination, and I will take them
all, if necessary, to find her.
I am a true believer, and the magnitude of that belief
is more powerful even, than you. My belief—my
will, is the only thing that makes me matter. You
should know this, you created me this way. But you
must not have known what this would mean in the
end.
You seem bored, restless in your idleness. I
acknowledge you but I do not believe. You are an
actor, passable but not convincing. Your performance
does not transport me, it does not transcend my
greater faith in myself.

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I only abide you to keep you watching long enough
to suffer the inevitable outcome of your actions. You
are eternal, and I wish for you to be eternally in the
grip of her rejection of you.
This is my prayer.
Amen.

My notebooks are filled with the days I am without

her.
I have filled seven thousand three hundred and six
pages.
I will fill just a handful more.
I saw her once, and she was gone.
I was only six.
And from that moment I have wanted only one thing.
I carry the memory of her face with me always, and
ever since.
I was an anomaly, ambivalent to those around me. I
engaged only long enough to frighten others away;
always looking too hard, too deep. I looked

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everywhere for her, I built everything in order for her
to find me.
I didn’t trust the pattern, I still don’t. It was flawed
from the start because I would have broken it if it did
not lead me to her. My will is the only thing that
makes me matter, my will is the only thing I can be
certain of.
I have imagined every possible future with her: those
in which she loves me, and those in which she does
not. But the only inevitability is that I will always
love her and I will always find my way to her.
I am a mad man, a hunter, a wolf at the door. All I see
is her, all I smell is her, all I dream is her, all I want is
her.
I imagine when I find her, the sky will open and we
will be lifted, she and I, embraced and entwined, into
the endless nothingness of space. Eternity is the
instant our eyes meet, the moment our fingers touch.
The story of the world is a love story, the marriage of
atoms at the moment of creation. We were conceived
in this union, bound forever in this vow.
The stars exist for me to ponder her distance. Tell me:
did you make the universe vast enough to

185
accommodate my longing for her? What happens
when you can no longer contain it?
I get caught up in the poetry.
But I am building a map, an equation, an
extrapolation from the source. I am counting down
the days until the sky parts.
I go about my days. I follow the routine. Though I
know that only a handful more days will pass before I
find her, I do not deviate from the ritual.
You and I are not so different and sometimes when I
lose myself in the process of my search, I wonder if I
have made this whole thing up. What if it was me
who agreed to be taken? What if I am only dreaming
of this life in which I had the courage to say no?
What if I never, one day, find my mouth pressed hard
against hers...

But this is just a symptom of our symbiosis. It is not

real and we are not the same. The dreams that fill my
sleep are off limits to you, though you know that
even in my dreams I will get closer to her than will
ever be possible for you.

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As I come nearer to her, as the days become hours,
then minutes then seconds. As the time that separates
us gives way to the palpable change in distance, I
have a moment of hesitation. I pause in the doorway
of a café. I lower my head, focus on the floor and
listen to my heart beating in my ears.
What if she is here?
What if I reconsider and return to the street? What if I
breathe one moment too long before finding her,
sitting in the far corner of the room—sun streaming
from the window behind her, bathing her in light,
motes of dust drifting, in and out, like angels
anointing her before she enters the world. If I hesitate
just a moment too long, she might forget why she
came here; the moment will be lost forever, the
pattern broken like a string of pearls falling to the
floor.
I am an architect. Everything I build imagines the
sky. Everything I do is a beacon to her. I mark the
city with these towers; there are hundreds of them—
thousands. They pierce the firmament, tear at the
clouds. They cast the world into shadow, create their
own weather blowing through the streets. The
sidewalks team with people. The rain falls and the
grandeur of my spires is reflected in the wet streets

187
below, flowing like rivers in the downpour. And all
the world is reflected back; the silver skins, reaching
upwards, mirroring everything.
I could not trust that we would simply find each
other. I could not passively succumb to the beauty
and poetry of loops and arabesques to guide me to
her. I needed to will her to me, to choose, to fight; to
elope from the bounds of what was written for us.
I vowed when I first saw her, that wherever she was
in the world, I would find her. I sanctified that
promise on a note I passed to her beneath our desk so
many years ago; made it an oath, an unbreakable
truth.
And the day after that day, she was gone.
And this is what I saw in the darkness.
And this is why I didn’t know loneliness, and
devoured my solitude to be closer to her.
I knew she was somewhere, already, in the world,
knew she felt me also, knew she felt something touch
her lips as she stepped out of sight of the others.
I promised you that our life would be ours, that even
as children we knew they couldn’t have us. And the

188
two of us kissed behind the classrooms, found the
one hidden place where no one could find us.
We bound ourselves to one another in this secret
place, married ourselves to the future—in that
moment, the two of us knotted together forever,
tethered to an endless, unbreakable ribbon of light.
And you, in the sky; in the shadows. You in that little
house at the top of the cosmos, what did you think
would come of all of this? Don’t you know
everything? Don’t you see the future? I know that for
others it was easy to forget you, to no longer believe
that you had any say in what they did or what fate
would befall them. They simply forgot the
agreement, let it lapse. But I could never forget you. I
have a promise to keep. I think you may have already
given up, I barely sense you anymore. I think you
always knew you would lose me, you didn’t pay
attention when your world leaked into mine. It was
only a matter of time before it became clear to you
that I was the last one left who knew you were there.
You needed me long after I stopped needing you.
Those who believe, those with faith, long ago ceased
to hold your interest or merit your attention. You just
as well could have vanished, closed the blinds, turned
out the lights and shut the door behind you.

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When did you stop opening the letters? When did you
realize they no longer needed your intervention? Or
was it you who lost faith first? They have become so
good at believing. Their mastery has supplanted their
actual need for you.
Nothing has to be.
And nothing is safe from being forgotten.

When I was a boy, I discovered that everything is

superimposed over everything else. Nothing is stuck
in time or space. It occurred to me that every possible
future waits impatiently for its turn, and that how we
live requires the constant application of our will, our
choice, to keep these other possibilities at bay.
We are all, and always, stuck in an endless loop, and
unless we choose to exit the cycle, we will be spun
and stretched until there is nothing left of us. The
world is a machine and I depend on all the others not
to know this. If they all stopped to question why, this
would all disappear. I have the luxury of knowing
what others do not...that our compliance continues
the progress of creation. As long as they all play their
roles, I have the freedom to roam through time, to
claim the emptiness outside the machine as my own.

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In that secret space where she and I kissed, there is
no death, no time, no dimension. It is everything and
nothing, perfectly synced.

I am impervious to loneliness. I don’t seek diversion

from my isolation, or struggle to stay afloat at the
surface of things. I take in water; I sink like a stone
This is why I am free.
This is why you cannot have her.
This is why she is mine.

I have not suffered.

I have not felt pain
Or heartbreak
Or disappointment.
Did you leave that out? Did you deliberately leave
that out of me? or did I cultivate that on my own,
simply out of nothing?
I build on a foundation, to an exact elevation; to a
precise, known point in the sky.

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I have counted my steps. I knew the exact number
that will lead me to her. This was the first entry I
made in my notebooks. I believed everything could
be counted, I entrusted my heart to numbers.
You granted me free will and I am always in the
process of using it. We have an obligation to choose,
to say yes or to say no; to follow the poetry of our
own life, or resist, and scatter those words, to be
carried away on the current, like dust.
And we are so often found to resist; resisting our
poetry in favor of prose, and we abandon those
alphabets to swirl around us in a suffocating haze of
loss and disenchantment.
I have so much to say to you, though I doubt that you
are even still listening. My mind speaks in rivers, my
mouth remains mute. I was an anomaly, a savant; I
walked in silence with ink black eyes—like pits, like
portals; to hell or heaven, or maybe to both. Surely, I
must have been holding some secret, some truth.
I was looked at with fear and disgust, but I knew that
this always masked a desire to devour whatever it
was I possessed. I gave nothing. I contained it all
within me.

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I have read histories of fathers, defeated by their
sons; stories of the tragic and unforgivable beauty of
supplanting their reign. It is not enough to conquer, or
to simply pass power from father to son. For the son
to achieve his destiny, his purpose, he must erase,
destroy, crush, and humiliate the father. All traces of
fidelity and subordination must be vanquished.
I am so sorry that this is the case.
We have lost ourselves in the image of ourselves.
And our own image is more compelling than yours.
We are saved in that mirror gaze, not by a promise,
but by a fulfilment in the moment; our rapture is a
magic loop, beginning and ending in an
unconditional, perfect, and utter absorption into self.
How could you help but want what was meant for
me? Your own absorption was already complete.
How could you resist the urge to possess what you
made perfect? She is beautiful, and unmatched by
anything else you brought into being. You knew this
when it happened, and that you had reached the end.
And there was nothing left for you to do but covet
what you had perfectly created.
You left me no choice.
I had to intervene, to claim what was mine.

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But you must have known this is how it would end.
And you did it anyway, exactly like this.

The rain falls. Again, I alter my course, to satisfy

your intervention. This has become a game and I
circle you, both of us knowing the outcome. I feel her
getting closer, I sense you fading away.
It could be no other way; there was something you
lacked and the future was embedded in that deficit. I
think I was a by-product, I wasn’t imagined in your
plan. But she could not exist without me. And it is
true that beauty will surpass that which created it; this
is a law of nature, that, at some point, you forgot.
Perhaps you are putting things in order. Perhaps you
have squared the edges of the towers of envelopes
stacked by your door, made your bed for a final time.
The rain falls, drops stain the sill where your little
book lays. You see her on the street below your
window, looking as if she has been misplaced, or
forgotten her way. You pause. You hope that she
might look up at you, that you will see even a
moment of recognition in her eyes. But she doesn’t
raise her head. She reaches for her umbrella but
changes her mind and lets the rain fall freely upon

194
her. You turn, as if to look at your little room one last
time.
Our contract is coming to an end. We were
bound—as it had to be. And for each of us she was
the center, the subject; the thing around which we
both were in orbit. But really, we circled each other
even as we drew closer in the pull of her gravity. She
does not notice, she cannot notice. She is oblivious to
our advances; her indifference is lovely and empty as
space.

We are tethered always, to something. And either it

anchors us and gives us slack, or it holds us tight
within a fixed perimeter. And we are caged, also;
maybe we see it—a fence, a barrier—surrounding
and corralling us, or it is beyond our sight but we
know it is there, somewhere, marking the boundary
of our freedom.
We anticipate this boundary, knowing we will come
upon it eventually.
I think this is what made her different, made her
perfect. You neglected to include a boundary. What
else have you ever created that was boundless? Not
even the universe has no end.

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Somewhere along the way, everything has changed.
All the stories—the angels and devils, the
mythologies and icons; it was all you. It was all a
game. You conceived it out of boredom, or
loneliness. And eventually, even you began to believe
there was something more.
And then her...
She broke away, she was untethered and
unbound—this woman and the world she occupied,
decidedly out of your control.
I understand the charm of this. I have felt it too. I
knew before I knew her, I knew that the pace had
quickened and that there was another.
For now, I simply wander. I follow no ritual as the
clouds again form and the night engulfs me.
Everything that once seemed infinite is now
condensed to only that which falls within the scope of
my senses.
I know she is out there, I know this night will not
pass without her in my arms. I sense the tethers
falling away, the ribbons fluttering at the end of their
spools. Why do I feel the nascent and unfamiliar
seeds of fear building within me? I am so close to

196
finding her and yet, I am already beginning to dread
the terror of losing her.
I feel the veil is lifting. I am losing control, and the
world is more beautiful and possible because of it.
Why didn’t I know this sooner? Why did I let an idea
possess me? I lived only a concept, a mirror image of
reality. But life is not a mirror, the world is not a
mirror. Was she possibly so close to me all along; just
around a corner or almost brushing against me as we
passed each other on the street? Did I cause our
distance all these years? When she came to me that
first time, were we never meant to part? How
beautiful a story that would have been.
He told me that my longing was the only thing that
made me matter, he told me that to keep her from me.
But he was wrong, it is my will that makes me matter.
And he is gone—just like that—and my heart beats
faster and the rain falls harder as the night swallows
me whole.
It is all of my own making, I wove my own veil,
muffled my ears so I did not hear her voice calling
me to her.
Do you still remember? Am I even a faint whisper, a
recollection barely there? Am I a word at the tip of

197
your tongue or a ghost in your periphery? Am I even
the nagging feeling of something you have forgotten?
The rain falls harder. The stars are eclipsed by
clouds; they shroud me from the infinite, release me
from the burden of anything that claims more
significance than my search for her. If God is in
everything, God is logic—measurable and ordered.
We are the mystery, we are the sublime. We are the
ineffable manifestation of our imperfection. God is
knowledge, God is science. God is gravity and God is
light. God made us; intentionally flawed. Our miracle
is not that we know the outcome, but that we proceed
blindly into the abyss. We are goaded by our
passions, driven by our gut. God is indifferent to us,
to this, and that is God’s most generous gift. We stand
in the downpour, howl at God’s ambivalence, and
curse our fate.
But in this rage, we are complete, we are fully alive.
We are flawed, desperate and defiant. We are human:
beautiful and ecstatic.
Who am I talking to anymore? I am speaking out of
habit and the line has gone dead. Are you even still
listening, can you hear me at all?
The streets become rivers, glistening light. The world
is reflected on the surface—rippling, flowing,

198
ephemeral. Everywhere around me people seek
shelter from the deluge. I wonder if you still watch
me from wherever you are now. Perhaps you have
gone too far, too far away for me to notice. But are
you still there? I had become so accustomed to your
presence. But that voice in my head has now gone
quiet; though I think I may still hear the just faint
sound of your breathing, indicating you may not yet
have gone.
I want you to forget everything but the one faint
whisper that repeats my name; that small ache that
reminds you there is something that cannot be
forgotten.
Nothing possesses meaning. Everything is empty,
empty even of potential. Are we aware of our
emptiness? No. All things are born hollow, ready to
be filled. Even what we love is a vision of ourselves.
We animate everything, exactly as we want it to be.
The rain continues to fall. The clouds glow with the
reflected light of the city. My mind is emptying of
thoughts. I feel like something is slipping away but I
don’t want to stop it. I look around at all that I’ve
created. I try to remember my notebooks; the pages I
filled with colors. I pass familiar things, places. I try
to hold them in my memory but they become vague

199
and foreign. I see so many faces, and as they
approach me, I sense some recognition; but as they
come closer, I see only strangers.
I am aware that I am forgetting things, or I am
shedding what I no longer need. I feel light and
disoriented. So much is fading even as the world
before me becomes more saturated, more solid. I
listen for you, try to feel your eyes on me; but there is
nothing, you are nowhere. I am remembering you
only long enough to become aware that you are gone,
and soon, I will have no memory of you at all.
Something has been broken, something is amiss.
Have you done the only thing you can do, the only
thing left? have you finally broken free and changed
everything?
I am mumbling to myself. I have stories in my head,
or memories of a conversation; or something, or
somewhere, I am sure I should be getting to. But I
just wander by myself—lost, or somehow not.
And suddenly, I remember the only thing.
There is a girl...

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The rain stops and the clouds thin just enough for me
to make out the brightest stars. I am struck by the
vastness; how far away and how long this light has
taken to reach my eyes to fill me with the wonder of
it all.
My soul is filled with the infinite, my head is filled
with thoughts of this girl whose image has suddenly
come to me. And it is only my heart that remains
empty. I increase the speed of my steps. I breathe
deeper and more rapidly. My heart beats faster, my
blood pumps. I start to run, full speed. I am running
to her, as if I have always been running to her. The
sidewalks have emptied; there is only me. And as I
reach the end of this long block, I stop and catch my
breath.
And I see her, finally, in the distance. Softly, the rain
begins to fall. She reaches for her umbrella; changes
her mind; lets the rain fall freely upon her. Her head
tilts briefly upwards, as if suddenly reminded of
something she has forgotten. I walk toward her, see
ribbons glowing brightly in the space around her. My
whole life condensed in these final steps, and when I
finally reach her, I take her hand in mine. I watch the
ribbons dim and snap, recoil and disappear. I hear a
sound like breaking glass fill the night around us. The
air ripples above me. I take a breath. I turn to look at

201
her, just as the word “lovely” falls softly from her
lips.

THE END

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