Wednesday, July 6, 2011

cgs (more)

part i (cont'd,)

she also said "lol," and that's sort of important.  he's never been entirely clear why, but it's always been important.  either he said it, or his friends said it, that if you're deciding to sleep with someone, their saying "lol," can really seal the deal into that category of "no."  he is entirely sure he has a category of "no," and she would fall cleanly into that, although in categorical form it was not an imperative, but that's only in the physical plane, in that realm of materiality that is so terribly fleeting.  in other words, in the ideal, he would never consider it, but this is not an ideal place, and in this broken paradise, he would make an exception, and he sometimes enjoys thinking about how this was so begrudging to him when, in truth, she was exceptionally capable of holding a place for him that should rightfully be reserved for a goddess.

this isn't metaphorical, or from too much robert graves (do people read him anymore? does anyone remember him anymore?), these goddesses are really real, or rather, really there, in an ideal and material place for him, not necessarily by choice.  he heard muses a long time ago, and started to listen, and then he knocked, and they answered, and when the door was open, to let the room breathe, the ocean took over, and seafoam covered everything that was once just a poem.  she was like a poem, but she was also made of something that could be contained by skin.  not entirely contained.  too hard to forget about that.  fissures and expenditures always make it possible for time to enter through the bloodstream, and demand nothing less than deep and rapid breaths, and a heart that would find its voice somewhere in the middle of the night when no one else is awake but the lovers and the dead ones.

this isn't anything any more than a secret thought that he isn't able to keep very long, held in the crease of an unbroken tongue, the thought that he always wanted to learn how to dance the tango, and considered himself to be much too arrhythmic to even try, but on some nights with her, it almost felt like they could do it, and it was almost like they didn't even have to try, and the quickening breath happened often enough and easily enough that it was like the laughter of children.  that it fell like anything falls, that it was as easy as gravity, and it was also easy enough that it was very clear to see that it was falling as far as anything could fall, and that it might hurt when it finally hit something  that might be part of the magic of blood.  eventually the bodies will fall until someone breaks, gets pregnant, or steals something.

this isn't anything less than a story about gravity, and it begins with a near-conception, and ends with the sound that bones make when they hit the ground.  but everything that's essential, the sticky and the sweet parts, are deep in the middle.

and the most interesting part by far is one of the few scenes with a physical description so far.  there is a woman with brown eyes in an irish green shirt, and there's too many cell phones in this cafe to hear anything but the sound of something bright happening between paragraphs, but it all fades so quickly into the morning that he doesn't even stop to think about how his orange shirt is perfect for her, that they could make ireland together, only he is not comfortable being orange, but that's too political suddenly and uncomfortably.

his friend takes photographs of him curled up in a praying buddha pose,  then he takes a picture of him staring into the lens, his fingers a "v" and his tongue in between them.  this is the picture he wants to represent him for awhile, because he wants to be a bad boy, or wants to be seen as a bad boy, or maybe it's just because it's hot now and being a bad boy is all he can think of, because in the heat, everyone has run out of ideas.  it's a little alarming then, when, her picture, he sees her picture, suddenly and uncomfortably, with her fingers and tongue in the same position, and she is a remarkably handsome bad boy, enough so that he kind of wishes suddenly that she were his older brother, but she is too young for that.  unless he were born on a leap day, which is still possible.

there is a lot in this that has to fall in and out of the realms of the impossible or not.  before he knew where his brother was buried, it was one story, before he knew exactly the spot, it was another story, and before the bones in the dirt began to speak, it was a possibility that existed in his head as a series of limitless possibilities.

everyone, perhaps, is more comfortable with the idea of limitless possibilities than we might like to think.  when they fall into the realm of definitions, that's when they become something else, and usually disappointing.

"why am i so important?" she was saying once, crying once.

he didn't know how to answer, because it was not a very good day for answering anything.  in the first place, he had recently begun to learn that all of his sins were committed at the edges of his tongue, and never in the dark, and always in the light.  he decided recently that he wouldn't speak about her, not to anyone, because it was becoming clear that anyone was not willing to keep things between anyone, and that anyone was speaking about him as much as anyone was speaking about her, and anyone was hiding their intentions, and the whole thing felt spooky at best, and somehow very republican.

so he couldn't even answer her, because he wasn't talking about her, not even to her, but now he understood that if he could answer, it would be something like: because whenever she fell into the realm of definition or determining becoming, it was always as an in-between, and this in-between was not only a space that he loved, but that this space held a human being that he also loved, and would never understand, and that, in this way, she reminded him of him, only slightly different, like a brother or a perfect lover or something in between.

(cont'd.)

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