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[Friday, September 1, 2006
11:28pm] |
a story that indirectly involves light sources, squinting, the sound of loose change in pockets, sand on faces, and the possibility of anti-depressants looming in the future like the moon itself:
Out here where the roads stretch for miles without a single car, the sky looms large above us and the wind blows our shirts from inside out, one might feel cold if not for the mathematics of things - one plus one is two and tonight I need to believe that is a good thing. As he sleeps, I try to think of all the things I know about the moon: The moon hangs in the sky like a big light bulb, we are grateful for the moon which illuminates and shows without which we would wander off and go astray, the moon is brilliant and alone, and on and on. I had a few drinks at the party; nothing that has stuck with me, thankfully, although it had seemed like a good idea on my way there to wreck myself. The host was a good friend of mine, and I had his word I could crash on his couch at the end of the night. Back in front of the wheel, now, I feel silently grateful for not yet having impaired my ability to drive. It feels like an important thing, this, the driving him somewhere else, and the automatic knowledge of things, things that generally seem mundane and useless - the foot on pedal, the traffic light stops, the entire town map eaten out by fast food chains, all of which set the stage for so much of my adolescence.
Oh, small towns. Sure, there are things all young folk love about the city: the possibility of Chinese take out at 4 am, for instance, or how you can poke fun at tourists on the subway; the bumping into people you never thought you'd see again just to please that "such a small world" cliché waiting to be pleased in all of us, so on and forth. But what of the small towns, in their silence, awkwardness, backwardness, naiveté, in their bad sense of humor, fat bellies, rotten teeth - and I do not mean to romanticize - all that religion, the blindfolded tradition, the faith hanging like ornaments on doors, and the faces at the market place, plump and happy to see you, arms open wide like big balloons, the intersecting social circles all-encompassing and overwhelming at once – all that life, not a shadow of itself but actually living itself out, all that touching, hopping, the eyes gazing out, watching others’ stories unravel while theirs stay on hold, watching young people bloom from one incomplete thing to another – unlike in the cities, with the people with their eyes in their pockets and not on their heads, fearful of both watching and being watched; sometimes, of course, overindulging in the comfort of not being watched, and finally, all the people who never have the time for all that looking in the first place. . .
And see, this boy with me - this boy asleep in the salty air and the shriveling landscape behind him, or whatever of it I can see running past us through his slightly open window - this sense of possibility - this isn't the kind of thing a city can offer you. It reminds me of something I once knew but have long since forgotten: of the potential our childhood held, of how whatever little love we knew then could turn a house into a home, love, then, not yet something selfish or transient or not means to an end but an end in itself. I start to watch him sleep and for a few minutes, for the first time in years, the entire world isn't a battleground of my future and the past; it feels as though they have all gathered, all of the times in the universe, my ancestors and my grandchildren, for a small moment in time, here, in this confined space, as in a fountain, for me to drink and drink and drink from.
* * *
The only time we stopped for gas, I asked him, “Where are we going?” but he did something weird with his mouth and focused back on the digital green numbers while I filled the tank. “I can pay half,” he said, but I only smiled in return, went inside to buy a bottle of water for him and a cup of tea for me. I was inside for a very short amount of time but when I got back in the car I saw how he was starting to doze off. Just once, before his eyes closed that last time, he mumbled - "you know how you yawned at the party, I really liked that." - the nervousness of which made me bite my lower lip, and got me knocking on the window repeatedly - I caught myself later. So I drove, drove a long way, drove to save my mouth and my knuckles; one of us half awake, the other half infatuated.
This is what I thought, then, with the windows down and the moonlight in my eye, trying to watch him, memorize him asleep: The saddest thing about a light source, particularly the moon, has to be how we are always too caught up in the excitement of what is it illuminates to expend any praise on and to attend to the light source itself.
* * *
Where the waves hit the shore, I pull the car to the side of the road, touch his shoulder. He wakes up, looks at me, not really shyly at all, and not apologetically, devoid even of any emotion, or maybe overflowing with too much of it. Why can't I tell with him?
Perhaps that's what he wanted originally. To fall asleep in a stranger's car. This has barely anything to do with me at all.
We get out, walk up the hill to the rocks I like. You can see everything from here.
“It’s not enough to want to be happy,” I say, finally. “It doesn’t stop there. First, you find happiness. You wait till it sticks to you, like a baby to the womb, until it's strong enough for you to carry it without having to worry it's going to fall off. Then you have to be happy with your happiness. You have to want it to stay.”
“That sounds quite complicated.”
“Maybe it isn’t. Maybe you just have to want it. Maybe you can will things into existing.”
“Well, fuck.”
* * *
"Did he ever mention me?"
"He used to tell me there had been nothing serious. Nothing serious before me."
"Asshole." He takes a deep breath. "He and I dated longer than you two did, you know."
I no longer know if I originally wanted to kiss him, or if I just thought this an opportunity to comfort in him all the parts of me that had been impossible to comfort.
"I am sorry he left you."
"I am sorry he left you, too."
For a trip that was meant to inspire anything but thought, I have become deeply pensive. That familiar pain of skull: but then I am made for thinking, inclined to work in all the terrifying, exhaustive ways that defy a boy, that make a boy not a boy but rather something else, something wrapped up constantly in movement, sharp like an electric razor, buzzing and hurting and not soft like a boy should be, something bitter and scabby and not at all fluid, like the stuttering engine of a car maybe, or - at best - dental floss. Perhaps that’s what I need the most – the not thinking, the absence of thinking, which is perhaps kissing, or touching, something without music, or subtitles, something stripped of its sharp edges, something baby proofed and simple but right.
* * *
"Why do we need love?" It makes me feel special, the way he asks these questions. If only he wouldn't look into my eyes when he does. It makes me wonder if he's always so comfortable with asking. It makes me want to not answer.
"I don't need love," I say. Well, I don't really say; rather, the words spill out of me. "What I need is someone to calm me down."
"That is love."
I take a look at him really fast, then turn away. I hate that he can maintain eye contact longer than I do. I feel like I am setting myself up for eternal failure.
"Are you anxious?"
"Almost always." Then - "It's the way we consume," I say. "It makes me nervous, to have tried possibly everything I could possibly try. To know how fast things come and go, how easy it is to be bored and practically impossible to be content. To have to wonder, always, if in ten years' time there will be any excitement left in looking forward to anything. I love too much music, know of too many books, have seen great acting and shitty acting, can tell a cheesy line from a heartfelt one in a wink. And photographs! I mean, photographs no longer feel extraordinary, life-changing. Do you take pictures?"
"Digital snapshots, like everyone else."
"Doesn't it hurt you?"
"What?"
"Doesn't it hurt you at all? That there are so many of them! So many snapshots! Everyone armed with cameras! The whole world all joined into one giant military, taking so much of the world without ever stopping to ask for permission. Undressing the skin off. Peeling it right to the bone."
"But they are my snapshots. That is not the same thing."
"THEY ARE ALL THE SAME! Same people in different party dresses, wearing each other's smiles. Stripping the world of its shadows, of privacy."
He looks at me like I'm losing my mind.
"You see," I begin. "Photography was my passion. And I used to do it because too many people spoke, and it was a way to explain without having to speak. It felt quiet, and personal. Now photographs feel just as - just as loud. Now they, too, seem to scream. Now I pick up the camera, shoot a bunch of things, but most days I forget to even look at them."
"That's a lot of calming down that you need. When you no longer know your passion. When you trade water for doubt."
"You don't understand. I am so tired of seeing."
He opens his arms, and I feel a whole lot like crying.
* * *
Those small towns. Those small towns with their boys sitting on some rock together, overlooking the same ocean, side by side and in silence. How their hands can move, ever so like a snake, making their way to buttons and from there to what the buttons hide beneath. Small towns with their boys who sit, at first quietly, then not so quietly, then kiss, and kiss with everything they've got. . .
I kiss him first.
I kiss him first and pull away. I never know what is appropriate: does anyone? I was not originally going to kiss him. I was going to get up and ask that we go, but I guess I wanted to see if it could silence me. And then he leaned in closer and kissed me back: Once again, caught off-guard - not only because he returned my kiss, but because I was expecting, I guess, to taste something else: history, or suffering; something deep in thought, some thing perhaps nostalgic, and mindlessly wandering, some thing like - me. And sure, there was some of that, like the burning of eyes from the sun, and too much salt - but there’s a bit of that always, isn’t there? This was the thing that surprised me: that if I closed my eyes – which I did – and let myself slip in far enough – which I did – I could allow the history to take the second seat, so that on the one side of this kiss there was only this boy, and on the other me, so that I am him, and he is me, and maybe we are kissing each other, or ourselves in each other, but regardless we are the two sides of the same hurting, same yearning, brushing against one another in kissing, and healing in many more ways than any kissing can usually heal. Forget the history of what came before and what you think is missing in you and here is a boy - just like you, a mouth like yours, or you with a mouth like his, and look at the way the dualities disappear, my god, and isn’t that the point of kissing in the first place, to erase the dualities, and all of the other things that came before, so that the two of you, having stepped aside from the planet for one very short minute to an alternate plane, can finally breathe, breathe the kind of air that is still fresh and the sand under your feet still sandy like when you were little, when you were so young in your big house any little amount of love of anything made the house into a home.
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[Thursday, November 4, 2004
8:05pm] |
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