It is with these thoughts in mind that I now see the drifter’s windburned face when I now consider my world-his face that reminds that there is still something left to believe in after there is nothing left to believe. A face for people like me-who were pushed to the edge of loneliness and who maybe fell off and who when we climbed back on, our world never looked the same.
Rick feels almost the way he used to halfway through his third drink, his favorite moment, the way he wishes all moments in life could feel: heightened with the sense that anything could happen at any moment – that being alive is important, because just when you least expect it, you might receive exactly what you least expect.
It was a December night so cold and clear that the air felt like the air of the Moon – lung-burning; mentholated and pure.
I broke out into a sweat and the worlds of Rilke, the poet, entered my brain – his notion that we are all of us born with a letter inside us, and that only if we are true to ourselves, may we be allowed to read it before we die.
I imagine I sow cuttings of Anna-Louise’s hair, like the fine stems of dried flowers, and watch sunflowers grow from the cuttings. I imagine I bury a pocket calculator with liquid crystals spelling her name, then watch the earth shoot forth lightning bolts. ‘We should open up a seafood house together,’ Anna-Louise says when she wants to torture me. Now that’s love.
This was unexpected, my soul’s connection to you. You stole my loneliness. No one knows that I was wishing for you, a thief, to enter my house of autonomy, that I had locked my doors but my windows were open, hoping, but not believing, you would enter.
We then return our gaze to the mirror-boxed future-towns circling us-the hard drives of our culture, where the human tribe is making flesh its deepest needs and fears; teaching machines to think; accelerating the pace of obsolescence; designing new animals to replace the animals we’ve erased; value adding; reconstructing the future.
I am reminded that no matter how hard you try, you can never be more than twelve years old with your parents.
And yet in the end did we ever really give each other completely to the other? Do either of us even know how to really share ourselves? Imagine the house is on fire and I reach to save one thing – what is it? Do you know? Imagine that I am drowning and I reach within myself to save that one memory which is me – what is it? Do you know? What things would either of us reach for? Neither of us know. After all these years we just wouldn’t know.
God, I wish he and I had been genuinely close as opposed to the “Don’t-they-look-nice-together-in-the-airbrushed-family-portrait close.
And so the point of this story is that when I first met you at the photocopy machine, sure, we talked like a telethon and everything, but the perfume you were wearing then – that perfume was the smell of my stamp album, the smell of countries I always wanted to visit but never thought I’d be able to. It was like you had the world inside you.
I think that emotions affect you as much as x-rays and vitamins and car crashes.
I believe that you’ve had most of your important memories by the time you’re thirty. After that, memory becomes water overflowing into an already full cup.
Exposing hypocrisy doesn’t make you a moral person.
Your Joan of Arcs and Supermans don’t come around too often. Mostly, the world is made up of people like me, plodding along. It’s what most people do – plod, plod, plod. While it kills me to come to grips with the fact that I’m like everyone else, that pain is outweighed by the comfort I get from being a member of the human race.
It’s amazing how you can be a total shithead, and yet your soul still wants to hang out with you.
The best thing about being young is being stupid. Or rather, the best thing about being young is being too stupid to know how stupid you really are.
Because in the end we forget everything, anyway. We’re human; we’re amnesia machines.
I’ve always been interested in the unintended side effects of technology. For instance, when the car was invented, who would have thought dogs would like sticking their heads out the window to enjoy the scentscape generated by speed and wind?
And I wondered then, how do we ever know what beauty lies inside of people, and the strange ways this world works to lure that beauty outward?