Wednesday: Writing

When this air sets upon me, I begin to feel the pull north. And I long for those days...those yellow leaves strewn on the green law, the little pathway to your house, the one year I drove up and pulled up to the curb and there you were.

That house is gone now, but what am I supposed to do with these memories? I have tried everything that I thought possible: I have set them on fire, I have tidied them away in a shoebox under my bed, I have ignored them, and now, I try to make them into something I hope will last forever. Here, within these words, I try to somehow revive you, to place you in some wordy formaldehyde, to preserve you, to display you.

For what exactly? Like the specimens we used to ogle on our stoned ramblings through the museum - I am not sure what you are anymore. You are a placard which reads something about my past, a past that is now so ancient it seems unworldly. And so I stare into your eyes, the color clouded. Your mouth is agape in thick liquid, your skin is gray. What are you? You are some prehistoric fish thought extinct but caught off the coast of the Amazon, a relic of a past so far away your skeleton seems impossible. Maybe I have put the bones together wrong.

Is this what you looked like? I attempt to reconstruct you from damaged fragments. I paint you up in gory lights, I furnish you with fake plants, I say, "This is what he looked like in 2003 BC." But what was that time really? Like the pipe we shattered on the campus grounds that night, these are only pieces, shards of memory forever expanding and expanding and expanding, like the stars across the universe, growing growing growing with one deep inhale, and then exhale, and then--!

If I could see your mother one last time I would kiss her hands and say how sorry I am because I did not know the gift I had before me. And even if I lived it again, I would never know it, even now I cannot know it, unknowing is the greatest symptom of youth, and it is unknowing that makes one youthful. If I were to unlearn myself, could I learn you again?

We drank so much that I cannot remember the darkness, only that sometimes, there are gaping holes in my memory-head, and my anxious mind attempts to reconnect those holes with something else, to string them together in some strange, fast narrative. This ancient fish they promised me once lived, but is now dead, and floating in chemicals beneath a sheet of glass, reeking from halfway across the room, reeking of suspended decay. You, this fish, your eyes clouded, your mouth open around your final breath, the tips of your fingers breaking off. And every year they move you, and you shift in the formaldehyde, and another piece breaks off. Your skin is so faded that I can see your veins, I can see inside of you, you are organs devoid of life. You, the works of body, the day you greeted me at the front and I sketched the muscles, and then we walked we walked we walked....

...across the campus at golden hour, the golden hour in my head, dripping like honey into the honeycombs of my brain, fitting the false pieces into the receptors of my brain, and feeling the glow of a world reborn around me - the first time I did shrooms. We walked arm and arm together, you told me about the steeds who steer the sun. I whispered to you about a language without words and how I named the animals, and the trees, and the buildings, and all the things before me as if this were the creation of Narnia, the creation of the World, the creation of Nirvana. And indeed that world grew and died before me a hundred times, as it grows and dies now, and the way...the way you said I held you and the frozen flowers in your back burst at my touch...and you and I were dying. We were dying.

How I read your private words, and swallowed them, and longed and longed to love you, but fell short. We burned the candle at both ends, we melted the wax on our bare skin, we burned each other, we hurt each other, we lost the thread, we lost the cookie crumb trail leading to the gingerbread house up north in that golden town, that little island in the bay, across the bridge, right next to Oakland.

And so what do I do with these memories? Here, I have tried to turn them into words. But the words are inherently empty because my heart is selfish, and a liar. I have thrown these words around just to confuse you, just to confuse myself, just to cleanse myself - unholy - at the altar of what? Of art? There is nothing more falsely sacred. There is nothing more falsely sacred than the impassioned love of youth.

My Romeo, my Juliet, my Coelacanth, I bid you adieu adieu adieu.

Writing November 18 2009


This is not my photo. I found it on coolislandsong24's Flickr. Nor is it a Coelacanth...it's the Megamouth Shark the Coelacanths share a display case with, which is the image I had been thinking of.