Heal

If I could have the chance to heal

The wounds and worry of past dismay

And issue hence a new reveal

Of confidence and reticence,

To bring about the change required

To start again and make it through

This time, with lasting consequence

And live the dreams I've long desired,

I'd heave the weight of several worlds

And of some several thousand souls

Along the path at last unfurled

So all, at last, made lasting sense

And all--since after all it's due

And overdue at that, I feel--

Would see the fruits of labored years

And see how love has all us healed.

Death by Pause

As nothing stretches into nothing,

The more the silence,

The more the senseless, relentless sound

Within the confines of a taskless mind

Lets loose my grasp on what is real

And belief in what is true, strength to keep on

Keeping on time,

With time and with peace, which,

Hypothetically,

Should reign down in heaps

In this empty, gifted space

Full of noisy, numbing, fumbling nothing.

The louder outside, the quieter within;

The mark of the lack of discipline

Emblazoned in and on my head

And in moments lost when, envisioning,

This very, selfsame time to rest

I did not know—I could not!—

That which I thought I'd have killed for

Would end up, at a maddening

And so-slow pace,

Killing me

With what I think

And how, naively, I had thought

I'd avoid this familiar, endless din,

Over and over

And over again.

Ruminations on Corinthians 13:4

"Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil, but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails."  Corinthians 13:4

Romantic love is certainly not patient, nor kind.  Full of envy, it boasts and Facebook posts when it sees itself reflected, is proud as a sonofabitch when it is well-received.  It is the rudest of all sentiments, keeping its host awake and jittery through all the garish and lonely hours, turning any taste for anything but that of one's lover's sweat and skin repugnant.  Self-seeking, it disallows consideration of or focus on anything but itself.  When not immediately acknowledged or insufficiently returned ("insufficient" being a wildly and illogically subjective term depending on the wide-swinging moods of its subject), it counts these as unforgivable, tantrum-inducing wrongs and blazes with narcissistic and self-destructive anger.  Love can turn one’s thoughts toward evil or even violence if the truth reveals anything less than what it believes it to be; i.e., that it is the center of its own universe, that nothing else exists, and if it does, it is pure and simple shit.  It inspires a shocking indifference toward self-protection or respect toward its object and an insipid fear of any minor transgression that would instantly shatter its fickle trust.

True, love hopes, but it is the sort of hope that can be irrational and far outlast love’s failure, persevering until the afflicted has rended all the hair from their head, starved away 20% of their original countenance, alienated and flippantly bored all of their friends with their alternating depressive complaint and manic joy and braggartry, grown totally inconsolable and gone completely mad.

Unless, of course, it finds spectacular, too-intense, transcendent, blissful, nirvanic company with another of the same crazy and infected sort; in which case you can take all of the aforementioned sufferings and square them either up or down, depending on the length and tenacity of the relationship, and of those involved.

Is love worth all the sacrifice?  The suffering?  The violent and possessed-obsessed behaviors that overwhelm even the meekest of the meek, or the strongest of the strong, or the calmest of the calm, reducing them to moody, obnoxious infants?

History, poets, authors, laymen, royalty, philosophers, Walt Disney, the top-twenty hits on the music charts since the beginning of time, and even I, say yes. Why?

Because DAMN; when it’s good, it’s fucking spectacular.

present, part one

Cicadas, in the heat of the day and of their mating fervor, can produce a call with the decibel equivalent of a rock concert.  The inside of Lisa's head, in the heat of the day, the cool of the night, the air conditioning of her corner apartment or the middle of a meeting, can produce a comparable sound.  Difference is, her noise doesn’t protect her from bird predators or procure her a life partner, nor can anyone hear it but Lisa.

She wakes every morning, gets up, smokes a cigarette, sits down, gets up again, bends into down dog, lies down to try and sleep, fails, gets up again, smokes another cigarette and finally surrenders to a cup of coffee.  She sips while she tries to figure out whether or not her dreams were her actual life, and vice versa, and although coffee is something she claims to be unable to do without, it ends up winding her tighter around herself, which is what she doesn’t need.

Lisa is average—or, depending on the emotional attachment and embellishment of the onlooker, slightly above or below—in just about every way.  She isn’t too thin, isn’t too large, isn’t too fit.  Her hair and eyes aren’t too deeply brown, too light brown, no red highlights, no particularly alluring twist or smoothness.   She isn’t notably tall or short, and her clothing is neither fashionable nor offensive.  She attended a decent state college and earned a degree in business because that's what one does when one has no noteworthy fortes or talents. 

Her job begins at nine in the morning, and until five she earns a salary that just about supports her unextravagant lifestyle.  Like anyone else, she passively contemplates the benefits of earning just a bit more, though hasn’t anything in mind she’d want to do with the slight surplus. 

Sometimes she meets a few of her friends for happy hour, all from her division at work, but sometimes she can't.  Occasionally her boss will join them but he has new twin boys and a wife at home who are allergic to the smell (and the act) of beer.  She has one or two pints of whatever’s on tap, nothing special.  She doesn’t even particularly like beer, or any alcohol, but she doesn’t care to field the sort of interrogation that tends to emerge when one drinks a soda during happy hour.  She takes just one pre-drink aspirin to preemptively avoid the slight headache beer gives her. 

After an hour or so of decidedly happy (read: uneventful) shop talk and good-natured fun-poking at select higher-ups and “I sort of hoped the company Christmas party would be catered this year instead of the usual Olive Garden thing, but GOD those endless breadsticks are so good,” Lisa walks two blocks to the bus which brings her back to her apartment in twenty minutes.

Her apartment is tasteful with good light.  The walls were painted an easy beige when she signed the mortgage instead of that empty white color so she didn’t have to do much of anything to them.  They're hung with a few spare nature prints and fruits (in the kitchen, of course) she found for a pretty good deal at a framing joint around the corner from work.  Draped neatly over her tan L couch is an afghan her mother thought would be “a nice way to bring some color in.”  

Lisa hangs her keys on the key-hanger by the door, changes out of her work clothes into her comfy Levi’s Perfect Fit jeans, warms up a piece of pre-prepared chicken breast and a vegetable dish Sandra Lee thought would be a great way to “shake things up a bit” last week on cable and eats it at her chestnut, leafless kitchen table (the two extra leaves sit in the closet waiting for company).  She doesn’t like to eat in front of the television because in order to avoid becoming just another victim of the ever-growing American obesity epidemic, one should concentrate on and savor one’s food without distractions.

If it were Tuesday through Friday, she’d have gone to her step class before eating, but it’s Monday, so she hasn’t.  She finishes her meal, places her dishes in the dishwasher (leaving them in the kitchen sink marks the beginnings of a decaying sense of feng shui), and sits next to the afghan.  It’s itchy, so she doesn’t sit against it.  She flips through the pre-recorded offerings of her DVR and settles on the new episode of Entourage she missed while attending her co-worker’s weekday wedding the night it aired.

And then the noise starts.  But small at first, like maybe only two or three cicadas.  Her hand clenches around the remote.

past, finale

Somehow she stood, clothed, in the glaring sun, sweat dripping down her body (which she had re-relocated), staring at the boy with helmet in hand.  He was wearing sunglasses which obscured the only cool refuge she could think of as she tried not to stick to the pavement.  Once again, he tried to put her helmet on.

“I can do it,” she said, squeezing it over her throbbing skull like a too-tight girdle.  The roar of the motorcycle almost knocked her over as the boy started it.  He patted the seat behind him and she climbed on and clutched him with a desperation she did not like.

As the boy drove her back home, her face twisted into a similar, not-same wicked grin as the day before.  Or was it the day before?  She had lost her sense of time until it crashed back down with the sun when she asked for it, squeezing her, making it hard to breath.  Then she saw it.

Reflected in the back of the boy’s helmet (which she noticed had turned form black to red), staring her in the face, was her past.  She could smell the putrefying sores that had reclaimed his entire body, rotting the seersucker of his suit, their puss dripping toward the boy’s neck.

Panicked, she moved to catch it before it hit skin—but wait, there was no skin beneath the helmet, only a shock of translucent green feathers.  And the roaring had stopped, and a high-pitched reverberation had taken its place.  And she realized she was high up in the air.

She clung, not to the chest of the boy, but to the neck of the hummingbird, now large enough to carry her weight.  They were traveling at an insane speed, jolting in erratic directions, turning the towns below them into a nauseating blur that resembled a swirled bowl of oatmeal. 

Once she wrangled her stare from the chaos beneath them, she turned back to her past, so furiously livid that it turned her eyes to fire and their glow reflected exactly on top of his, so they were one and the same.

“Why are you here?” She screamed. 

The hummingbird replied in the voice of the boy, “I’m taking you home, love.” 

“I’m not talking to you,” she said, softer this time, not trusting that it was really the boy speaking to her, but careful just in case.

Now she whispered, tersely, “Did you hear what he said?  We’re going HOME.  You go get your disgusting chair, and you get the fuck out!”

Her past gurgled with a slow, rising, patronizing laugh.  “You still don’t get it, do you,” he growled.  “I GAVE him to you for a night because you were looking so damned pitiful in your moping and your melting and your fear.  He’s LEAVING you now, you dumb bitch.  I thought a good lay might cheer you up so I could get some sleep instead of spending all fucking night answering all of your stupid, tired, same-old questions over and over and over and over.…”

She lifted off the hummingbird’s back slightly and grabbed the red helmet with her past’s face inside.  With a scream that encompassed the entire world, she ripped the helmet off her feathered boy with such force that she launched both her past and herself off their perch and into the open air.

“Now I’ve got you.  Now you will die,” she hissed at her past, not yet understanding, not yet registering.

“Well, perhaps I’ve underestimated,” he said as they tumbled down and down.  “Only for someone with no future, there is no past.”  His face faded from the helmet, and the helmet from her hands. 

There was a momentary jolt of panic in her brain, but with her past dead and gone, it only lasted a second.  There was no sound, no noise, except the gentle whooshing of the air as it buffered her body with increasing speed, and the noise of the hummingbird’s wings who hovered just above her, keeping her calm and cool and quiet with the winsome, melancholy gaze of his big, deep, blue eyes.

past, part five

Darkness gave way to the uncomfortable slant of dawn throwing yellow jail bars across her body through shutters as she lay, twisted and sweaty from dreams she could not remember. She also could not remember who, what or where she was, and could not see herself—only the parallel lines of light the sun illuminated.

She lay, paralyzed for a moment and confused. She felt a vague notion of having to use the bathroom somewhere underneath the light and wondered how on earth (Yes! Earth! That's where she was...) she would get to the toilet with no body.  Did she ever have one?  Was it beautiful?  How silly and vain her thoughts seemed to her.

The smell of flower decay registered in her head, though faintly (Yes! Smell! She had a nose...).  It was then that she felt an irritating, scratching sensation beneath her left shoulder, and then she actually saw her shoulder, and then her nose appeared between the peripheries of her sight, and slowly, methodically, the rest of her body revealed itself to her. It was pressed up against the boy who faced the wall and whose chest rose and fell in shallow, dreamless rhythm. The boy was on a bed, as was she, and it was his. The shutters were his. The light was, too.

She reached behind her shoulder and pulled out a single, gray petal of a rose. “How familiar,” she thought, but could not place where she had seen it before.

Her movement stirred the boy who stretched his long, beautiful limbs out, and then around her, and in that instant her discomfort and remaining confusion dissipated.  His large blue eyes opened to her, pulling her into their cool, anesthetizing quiet.

“Hi,” he said, echoes of the tough lovemaking from the previous evening washing over them and leaving wicked smiles behind. She noticed a small green feather caught on his brow, and she blew it gently away.

“What time is it?” she asked, voice thick with sleep.

When the boy's eyes went hard with steely fear, she tumbled out from them, and the light from the shutters--much sharper now--once again stole her body away.  He ripped himself from the nest of bed sheets to find his watch. “Shit. I'm late,” he said.

Sinking back into paralysis, she watched him pick his black, crumpled clothing off the floor. She felt nothing but the boy's urgency as she thought, detached, “But how am I going to get home again?”

past, part four

The boy in black didn't see her coming. She stood for a moment in the doorway to the street, hesitant, wary. She felt as if a step forward would change things forever.  The acrid, sensual smell of fear--the kind of fear one feels in the presence of death--filled her nostrils.  She lifted one foot and inched it back.

“Are you sure you want to do that?” a voice warned her. She jumped, blinked hard. Emblazoned on the back of her eyelids was her past's head mingling amidst the blotchy remains of open-eye light. She noticed a sore had reappeared below his lower lip.

“Why don't you go back inside,” she hissed, and as she did so, the boy looked up. And so did she.

A blue calm that clearly came from his eyes enveloped her, fading (though not entirely) her past's face. She felt her legs advance slowly, then she ran, then she leapt into the boy's chest, who caught her gently and firmly and crushed all of the noise, all of the terrible noise from the street, from her head, from her past, into liquid quiet.

“I've missed you,” he said. His stare bore through her in a way that undid and redid her at the same time. Blue flame crept through her chest that set many of the dead things inside of her on sweet, searing fire.

“I've missed you, too,” she breathed back, leaning into him. The boy pointed toward the bike.

“Shall we go?” Tenderly, he strapped on her helmet. She felt like a child. She could have done it herself, but she let him. She wanted it.

And on the back of the bike that roared through her bones a devilish smile forced her lips apart. She grabbed his chest with one hand that was instantly electrified by sheer contact, and the moment they drove off she gave one last, hard blink and her past's face was shattered into nothingness.

past, part three

Back, then forth. Forth, then back, then forth again, but always back.

Past grunted from his chair. “Would you be still, woman? You're giving my neck a cramp.”

She tripped over the tossed aftershave bottle, and stared at it with such intensity that it began to melt, then disappeared altogether. “What time is it?” she demanded, still staring at the spot where the bottle used to be.

“Aren't you tricky,” he quipped, clearly enjoying the froth she had whipped up beneath her feet and inside her head and heart. He pointed to the faceless watch strapped to his fat wrist. “You know I can't tell time.”

The floor began to rumble with a deep, guttural noise that appeared to be emanating from her past's lap. In it lay the red memory book, which was now erupting with tiny golden orbs of sparkly light. Past lifted a monolithic arm and waved the orbs, and the noise, out of the window.

“What are you doing?” she cried, running to see where he had sent them.

There on the street, circled in gold, was the blonde boy from the book dismounting a motorcycle. He was taller than she remembered, and as he removed his helmet, she saw that his head was shaven clean and soft and though they were still that clear, impossible blue that one cannot see and remain unaffected, his eyes were now somehow deeper—darker—like his black clothing.

She turned to her past, who held a mirror, and in that mirror she saw her red-brown eyes were just as deep, and just as dark, as was her own black clothing, and after a moment she realized she was peering at the boy's face and her own at the same time, and that she could not tell the difference.

“Why have you done this to me?” she cried, snatching the mirror from her past. The mirror's sharp edge cut her slightly, and she dropped it to the ground. Three drops of hot, red-gold blood fell onto her face's reflection as she stared down: one on her forehead, one between her eyes, and one on her lips right at the place where they parted slightly.

“Go and meet your fate,” said her past, and as she descended the stairs she tried to will and swallow the metallic aftertaste of blood away.

past, part two

When she woke the next morning, it was cooler and she smelled green roses. She had never smelled green roses before but somehow she knew. She glided into the living room, still damp with dreams.

Her past had slip-covered his smelly chair with smooth khaki canvas. His hair was gelled and combed over, she noticed, as he splashed the last of his travel-sized Aqua Velva onto his freshly shaven face. He tossed the empty bottle onto the floor.

He was wearing a fresh, sweat-stain-free seersucker suit with a green rose in the lapel. An impossibly tiny gray hummingbird hovered over the rose, and as it sipped the nectar its body slowly turned green. When it had sucked the rose to a crumpled gray, it flew straight to her and hung, suspended, an inch from her face.

She knew that look. She had seen it before. It was a warning—change was imminent, and it would be difficult. Once it was sure she had understood, the hummingbird disappeared out the window.

She turned her attention back to her past. On his lap was a red memory book. He patted the arm of the chair, inviting her to sit. “Look what I have found,” he said.

Her body jerked with indecisiveness as she moved toward him, and eventually, lightly, she perched next to him, legs still supporting half her weight. Just in case.

Her past opened the book and revealed the shimmering image of a blonde boy and her heart shook with remembrance. In the image the boy had her arms pinned to her sides, and her face was flushed with fear and excitement, and she noticed that the boy's was, too.

“Today he will return, but only for one night. Remember,” her past crooned arrogantly, “I am not all bad.”

Again she wept, but this time with an angry futility, because she could not stop the love from filling her, and she did not want it. Not at all.

past, part one

And the days slipped by like hours, and the hours like days, and the heat melted her bones like butter, and every nerve was active with discomfort, and yet she also felt nothing.

So she turned to her past, who was sitting in a patchy, musty chair smoking a moist and chewed cigar and dampening the velour fabric with his sweat.

"Why don't you get up from that chair?" she pleaded, desperate.

"Why should I?" he grunted, pointing out the window that was wavy and moving with the intense sun. "Besides," he continued, shifting ponderously in his seat, shaking the floor with his mass, "you won't let me."

She could see the sores prolonged contact with fabric had worn into his gray skin, and since the sight of them made her feel pity, which was the first time she felt anything in a long while, she went to get some salve. "Here," she said, dabbing the salve on his wounds with a cloth. "This should make you more comfortable."

After she had covered every sore, her past turned from gray to a sickly green that glowed and pulsated like the waves in the window. His eyes took on a new light, he seemed to increase in size and weight, and he sat upright in his chair.

"I think I'll stay much longer now," he decided, as she wept at her mistake.