vertigo/1

Suddenly.

There was a girl on a motorcycle.  And then, and then, there was a wolf, and then there was a wolf, and somewhere in there, there was an adventure that took place and the adventure was impossible to put into words, but she would try, and he would try, and then everything refused to go back to how it was before.  Not like a normal life.  Not like that.  Not returning to normal the way people talk about that.  Something else. 

Something like the clock inside the chest called the heart or something large and iconic like the heart, if not the heart, then something heart-like, something that always returns to a typical state, more typical than normal, really, like that, something like the clock could not go back to the typical state, could not re-set.  That’s it.

Start it again.

There was a girl on a motorcycle and there was a wolf and then suddenly the re-set program was missing.

It was like a crazy bird crawled into his skin and moved him from the inside, and made his face start to twitch, and he suspected she was moving him from the inside.  Meanwhile, she.  Was being moved from the inside, and when they were moving each other from the inside they were only making trouble for themselves.  It was troubling.  And there was no re-set.  That’s it, just like that, no re-set, moving from the inside, trouble, girl and wolf and that was all there was to it and that would be enough if that was all there was, more than most get in a life, most get hot and bothered and then they get themselves into trouble and then they get bored, but not crazy bored just sleepy bored, something that most can sustain for the remainder of a life in a body that is winding down, after high school we all wind down for the next 50 years, 60 years, some amount of time, unless we are interrupted, unless we get pulled out of the classroom and taught secret secrets, something they don’t teach in the classroom because they don’t know.

Hold on.  Something about an interruption.  In between ruptures there was a resting place, only this resting place had no re-set button in sight, so it was not so very restful, but bothersome, it was bothersome, and they were bothered, something like a big old hot mess of bothered hotness.

It was not summer.  Not at all, not really, not quite, because they fell asleep before summer ever got there.  That’s the saddest part of the story.  Not really.  The saddest part was this:

Long after all of this, and there’s something that needs to be said before we get to the long after but this is not very well put together at all, not at all, because after her he was no longer well put together, could not pull it off, could not walk out the door without being recognized as a wolf with some serious trouble inside him, twitching him from the inside, long after this, the saddest part (for him, this is only about him, except it’s also about her, but they get each other mixed up with each other sometimes as the story goes on, which is probably exceptional in some economies), the saddest part for him was that moment, the one that gets repeated, where his friend would say, “No one ever knows how these things turn out.”  And the friend kept changing faces, or rather, it was different friends who kept saying the same thing, “No one knows how these things will work out,”  and he would ask them, How does it turn out for them?  Does the girl get the wolf in the end, do they turn into each other in the end, does he become like a real boy at the end and have to wear shorts and suspenders in the end (because that might be an objection to this exceptional state of being in between, not wanting to become that thing in shorts not ever oh hell no), or does she turn into a real girl at the end with shorts and pigtails and pink ribbons and texts that say lol lol lol oh hell no, or is it her turning him into a wolf all the way and her turning into a wolf all the way and when they are animal all the way it is that state of having the trapdoor in the belly drop open and all the needles fall out and they find out what it is to be reckless, to be really reckless, is it that? Because he wants that.  Because that reminds him of her.  That feeling when the belly is more bare than ever, and everything is so very bare and they move together, covered with honey, stained with bloodhoney to the roots of the hair.

This is already too complicated.  He wants to know how the story turns out then, how it turned out for that them, to see if it could be that way for this them, and every story turns out somehow, it does turn out at some point, for a little while…in this one the wolf and the girl or the boy or the boy and the boy and the girl etcetcetc, they are together in the end, and in that one they lose each other, get married to people who turn out to love television more than anything, and they get sprinkled with the powder that makes them bored and sleepy and happy enough to stay in bed for the rest of the morning until it turns into the end of a life where the heart stops utterly because the veins are filled with artificial butter and no one can longer move any longer.  He wants to know how it will turn out for them, only no one knows how it turned out for themselves, because none of these stories ended yet, because they are not past stories.

In the past though, in the past only the stories about the tragic lovers make it into any of the complicated texts.  Unless they are stories about goddesses and gods, and they can’t be those, but maybe just maybe they are supposed to be pretending that they are. 

And that idea, that maybe they should pretend they are, starts to get into his fur and infect it with blood and honey, because there is something about all those stories that reminds him of this story.  There are lots of love stories, and he has lots of those written on his shaved ribs, but this one rises to the surface the most because it cuts the deepest and leaves the deepest marks, simply because there was nothing simple, she read him like a text, and he read her like a text, and it happens like that with any textual lovers writing on the textures of the skin and the fur, except here they read the footnotes and understood them and it seemed like everything that tried to move toward understanding only opened up more complexity, a sense that it was geometrically progressive toward more progression.  He, a drop of him on her belly, exploded outward and inward in a thousand directions.  She, a drop of blue sweat on his tongue, exploding like a text that could give birth to a universe, this was biological and not biological, this and this and this and that too, and so far outside an or that it was like floating on one of those ice rafts they have in the reindeer movies, far off at sea somewhere, hoping to be taken under, or hoping they might run into Bjork, hoping this dream might not be a dream at all.

And what’s worse, there’s more, and what’s worse, no more time.  Not here, not now, not like this.