He wants to move forward, but he doesn't know what that is.
She wants to swim, but she doesn't know how deep this is.
They want to understand each other just a little better, but they don't know where to start.
It's the hardest work, excavating the world of the dead for some hidden thing that the living are convinced they need to move forward or deeper, when the excavation itself is the movement and the depth anyone needs to come back to life in a darker season.
There's a fear that this next part will be unbearably lonely, but in truth, they couldn't be lonelier. And there's no cure for that.
He keeps meeting twins, they come out of boxes, they swim past his eyes when he is falling asleep, they make their way into some of his secret sleeping spaces, and ask him questions about the journey ahead, and he asks them questions about the journey behind. They dress in fancy clothes, and they dress in revealing layers of complicated underwear, and they drink cappuccino and wine with fruit, and they sometimes cover his forehead with their ideas of what a first kiss would feel like.
Whether it's the first kiss or the fifth, he's starting to convince himself that he remembers them all, and the ones that stick in the holes in the teeth the most are the ones that were nothing but frustrating, when things got lost in their mouths on their way through the complex processes of translation, or those pecks where the mouth would not open, like a flower that refused to yield to the bee.
He remembers all the times he felt pretentious and stupid and lazy, and he remembers the times when he felt like he had been sprinkled with fairy dust, something that would protect him on his way from here to there.
The way from here to there is long, and now there's no more here except for this particular here, no memory of origins, the place where you can tell your children, "This is the place and the moment when I first stepped out." And there's no there, nothing particular, just a vague sense that sometime very soon they are going to be elsewhere, and elsewhere sounds threatening and promising. But sometime very soon, one of those will win, something between threats and promises will win, and then they'll start, but for now they just sleep, forgetting that they could be sleeping in each others' arms, forgetting that this is about a search for the twin.
She wants to swim, but she doesn't know how deep this is.
They want to understand each other just a little better, but they don't know where to start.
It's the hardest work, excavating the world of the dead for some hidden thing that the living are convinced they need to move forward or deeper, when the excavation itself is the movement and the depth anyone needs to come back to life in a darker season.
There's a fear that this next part will be unbearably lonely, but in truth, they couldn't be lonelier. And there's no cure for that.
He keeps meeting twins, they come out of boxes, they swim past his eyes when he is falling asleep, they make their way into some of his secret sleeping spaces, and ask him questions about the journey ahead, and he asks them questions about the journey behind. They dress in fancy clothes, and they dress in revealing layers of complicated underwear, and they drink cappuccino and wine with fruit, and they sometimes cover his forehead with their ideas of what a first kiss would feel like.
Whether it's the first kiss or the fifth, he's starting to convince himself that he remembers them all, and the ones that stick in the holes in the teeth the most are the ones that were nothing but frustrating, when things got lost in their mouths on their way through the complex processes of translation, or those pecks where the mouth would not open, like a flower that refused to yield to the bee.
He remembers all the times he felt pretentious and stupid and lazy, and he remembers the times when he felt like he had been sprinkled with fairy dust, something that would protect him on his way from here to there.
The way from here to there is long, and now there's no more here except for this particular here, no memory of origins, the place where you can tell your children, "This is the place and the moment when I first stepped out." And there's no there, nothing particular, just a vague sense that sometime very soon they are going to be elsewhere, and elsewhere sounds threatening and promising. But sometime very soon, one of those will win, something between threats and promises will win, and then they'll start, but for now they just sleep, forgetting that they could be sleeping in each others' arms, forgetting that this is about a search for the twin.
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