There are practical advantages to sharing myself with you here: I refract and scatter less, I can behave as a reverse prism would and combine all the colours into white light. The shading too. At least, that's the laudable and sacrosanct goal. In this glowing box, splaying cold blue glow about the room, I can say all I wanted to before I lost sufficient serotonin reserves to adequately gussy up this prose into something suitably Byzantine and self-indulgent. Saying the words to people, directly into their eyes and face, is not something that comes easy to me.
Saying the words to you though, combined with the seminal thrusts of memories, all those vivid flashes where I felt so sexy for a change, those are even harder parts. You pried me apart, giving yourself access to those private areas where the emotive centre was both more prevalent and more primal. Those things live in their own place, and I gave it up to you. I can grasp onto those things. I can sink my fingernails into those things. I can taste those things. They're salty, like tears. Or, maybe...
I just thought it was the most amazing when you threw your head back to laugh. As I've grown, though, I have since come to realize that I have most missed your internal metronome. Once manipulated with careful fingers to accept different tempos, you would at once switch from innocuous small talk to luxuriant, unexpected eloquence, passion, even breathlessness. It was a refreshing splash of cold water, water with great depth. You taught and were taught. We taught each other, caught each other. So one particular night, during an all too brief respite from the frigid North, we walked, we talked, we were caught, and we taught.
We could have discussed anything, from the most infamous names in history to regular expressions, but we would not have remembered. It is unlikely I'll remember the words now--in the night we would declaim the sweet truths we would not admit to the day. Walking the paths along the river with the city light reflecting the night back to the ground, everything is blue in this world of memory. We could've made any small talk. Sometimes, believe it or not, we did.
But you know my moves, so here is a version of the dialogue: the way we chose to flirt, despite knowing how wrong it was.
Tell me what you know about refracted light. Oh, well, now that you mention it, I know something about that. Snow's white because the crystals do not absorb, scatter, transmit, or reflect one part of the visual spectrum more than another. Lean over the microscope and you'll see. The edges of the frozen water go this way and that, and light is handled in an egalitarian way. Even after the fragile forms of the snowflakes decay, melt, congeal even, the light is handled by some mystical equity.
Even when the temperature bobs around zero, and the dirt turns to muck, even when the ice creases and cracks and vanishes, unless disturbed, light still does its thing. Put your hands on the snow if you want. Your hands are so hot that it'll yield before the softest touch, the slightest pressure.
We were walking down this path, right downtown, and the trees were sinister, casting jagged shapes and shadows upon the ground. The packed, melting snow was making our feet wet and sad, but we knew where we were going, even when we knew where we were going. Our footsteps were muffled and the damp ground provided startling traction. It was sticky. It was deep into the evening, but everything was blue in that world. In spite of our hesitancy to hold hands, we were close enough. We knew where were going. When I had to grip you with both hands, I fell anyway. I had other choices, certainly.
We knew all this would happen of its own volition, so small talk would drift in and out. We would periodically stop, to realign our breathing. We would ask ourselves, when would it be safe in conversation to bring up the dangerous topics?
Colonel Gaddafi had a personal farm, with rare-breed camels and the like. He had cows. Lenin had a nameless cat, affectionately referred to by history as "Lenin's cat". Hitler loved dogs. Envision the menagerie kept by the kings and queens of old in the Tower of London, with its cold stone Barbary Lions. Even Mao was a serviceable poet. Pol Pot: a schoolteacher, loved by his students at university. It has always struck me as fascinating that these men, never humble, always prideful, have always been accompanied by varying historians wishing to gleefully impart some humanizing trait. Hitler's dog was named "Blondi." He loved that dog.
I am not like a brutal dictator. I am not even like a benevolent, Enlightened one. I do not see myself Ashurbanipal, the forward-thinking bronze age god-king of. Rather, I see myself like the light passing through the snow. I spread out, scatter, and reflect, no matter the dirt, melt, and muck. I warm things no matter how cold they get on the surface.
In payment of many debts I owe you, I tried to spin a tale about how, despite all doors being unlocked, that the masses were using only four out of twelve doors at the hall, like lemmings. We laughed, because as much as we love the masses we felt we stood apart like those ancient god-kings, or the separated colours on the correct side of the prism.
The strangest part, and perhaps the most complex part, is how my thoughts return to you so often. It happens in bits and pieces of some unexplainable whole when sleep seems far in the past or far in the future. It can happen during the too late or too early hours. Nowadays there is a space there where you lived. Inside the abyss where you pulled out what you wanted is that addiction thing, the druggie thing, the part of me that thinks of you still like some white substance always at the edge of my awareness. Maybe you'll always raise my pulse; bring colour to my cheeks; cause me to hold my breath; make my steps falter. Maybe I will always thrust myself into that dark place. It's at least partially illuminated.
At first I told myself that I should part myself completely, but the stomach cramps and old hurts return all the time, and they always will. I need to taste you in small doses, in restricted formats, in order to live the happiest of lives.
What I never told you, I suppose, is that I've always felt that I continually hex myself with baseless, trajectory-free, and patently false humility, which is in itself a form of pride, and an insidious one; I try to push it back, but it erupts at the worst of times.
I could quote you songs or poetry from hundreds of years ago and tell you that the booze and the blowens cop the lot. I could paraphrase to you about the conspiracies against the laity. I could arm myself with Beckett and tell you that we "give birth astride a grave," or that "the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more."
I am no different than that prismatic light, or those brutal dictators. I can be a creature of many layers or bands of colour. I can be the singular personification of, you know, whatever, but additionally I want only one thing from you at one time.
But all of this--the swearing of emotions felt in a limited place in time, the discourse we assumed was intellectual, the way you sunk your talons in with practiced pressure--all of this was a memory worth savouring, worthy equally of having regrets, or not having them. There are no real lessons to take away even now. Sometimes the lesson is that there is no lesson.
What I've learned is that I don't want the heat of the burns to fade: the heat still rises from my fingertips in remembrance of evenings lost. You had pale skin as smooth as cool alabaster, but it warmed in the winter. I cannot have many parts of what I want, but I hope we can warm up like a changing of season. I don't know anything.
Except: for the rest of my days I will love that in-between season all the more, the ageless season at rest at last. I can make peace with the dirty white snow, the lack of satisfaction of its compression underfoot. I no longer hate what I am, and I no longer hate that miserable, impure cold, because I thrust my prideful head up as high as it would go, and I held onto with both hands, and I fell anyway.
Comments
Post a Comment