I dreamt last night that we journeyed into the fading light.  Through the night.  Through the darkness into the sun.

Sometimes we were in your car, your right hand balanced on the wheel.  Your right hand deftly switching gears.

Sometimes we are perched on a dissolving iceberg, glacially slithering unbidden a winding path through streets.

Or I'm turning up the volume as your car succumbs to the whoosh of the car wash.  A song we thought we knew so well transforming with the thump of soapy curtains, the dark washed with streaks of refulgent water.

We could be side by side, sleekly shuttled on a train through a landscape altered by night.  Unable to understand, but fully aware of the slowly blinking slanted eyes that look back at us from the cloaked forests.

Always side by side, even in the train carriage where we could have faced each other.  Your profile is more familiar than the final turn off the road for home.  Your smile is only fathomable from this side.

You're always driving.  Always sitting a little ahead.  Closer to the window.  And yet we're shared in our ignorance of destination.  And yet.  We know that at some point you'll stop the car and I will leave you.  And yet.

At what point did I realize that the scent of you would inevitably evoke an instant pang?  To tell you how I feel puts too much weight on this space -- it makes it clear that after this you become a memory.  To put how I feel to words changes this memory to something irremovable from what I want to be elusive.

But if nothing else, I would put words to it because I don't want the way I see you to perish with me.

We travel through streets unknown and known...and some which are unfamiliar because we've only seen them by night.  One dark block we drive through you click a button to lock all the doors, the chunk of the mechanism emphasized by your tightened jaw.  There are different kinds of eyes staring back at us here from a different kind of forest.

One street we've never been to before, never could have, but you say, remember when.  And I say, yes.

I could tell you things.  I'd listen to any words you would form.  I could ask of you all the questions I mourn.  Who am I?  Where am I going?  What should I do and what can I give?

And yet.  The turn signal comes on and the clicks answer as we wait our turn:  This.  this.  and this.

We have a separate language each of us -- a mystery never even fulfilled by ourselves.  But someday I think we'll come to a mutual adumbration of what we meant to each other.

Once I leave you, you will fade.  And even now, I can't comprehend the strange grace of our odyssey.  Understand though, that to forget you doesn't mean you're forgiven the portent you have cast over me.  When we sojourned through the night, I trusted all that you said beyond any retribution.

You say, almost there.

I say, yes.

I can't tell you to slow down or to take another lap.  I don't want to take advantage of what I know to be your kindness.  And at the same time, I am too proud.

Your car slides to a stop and I don't linger.  Outside is one flickering street lamp leaking a puddle of light in the black.  After I close the door, I lean forward to look at you through the open window.  You do the same over your wheel and you face me.  It's the first time we've turned toward one another.

If truth can become a falsehood once it's made concrete by words, I'd wish the opposite to be true as well.

I say, see you soon.

You say, yes.

I see truth sometimes in that threshold of sleep.

I don't mean I have clairvoyant dreams, but in that veiled cusp before my body collides with oblivion, I understand you far better than I ever would in the blindness of day.  If you managed to extract pearled words from my mouth, I swear I'd soothsay all your worth.

In the long evenings, your shadow stretches long before you, beckoning to follow.  It's free from its imprisonment, binding you to its whim and direction.

Now, the time you're least responsible for your actions is when you have the most freedom.  Now, this time is when you have the attention to give to the collapse of constantly replenishing breath, to the endless tattoo of feet rhythm -- when you're not responsible for dictating your body to your will.

This is the time when the hallowed outlines of people have a golden glow as if you can see their souls through a temporal lens.  When you touch someone on the arm, your outlines converge.  Connecting.  An outline of honey warmth in the trace of your fingertip, making even the ordinary otherworldly as if to remind us of the glory inherent in the smallest grain if we could only recognize it.  This is a gift for you: the immortality that is only possible not because of what lies within, but because you are the one to see it.

Here is when I see the truth of my worth to you, if that joining of souls is possible as intented outlines merge. 

When your shadow transcends day to night, step softly so you don't disturb the dust of our feelings.  If I could, I'd ask for a few more years merely to dwell in your memory.  Faded to a gentle hush you'd yearn to touch, a fabric that disintegrates if handled carelessly.  Could you pay that close attention to me?  I could be so much more if I meant something.

But my somnolent wisdom doesn't reveal your faults or how you've damned me with your unwitting dismissal.  That isn't the truth this soft focus allows.  There are words you try to show but fail to, these words you change the memory of when you try to describe them.  These words are caught in the snare of my sandman.  This is a gift for me: the words you sent without any hope of revocation, reciprocation, or return.

Some things are only seen from afar and some only from a parenthetical sleep.  Would that I could understand what I do with eyes wide shut, or be so affected at seeing that softening of expression as an outsider.  Would that life were an endless dying day where we could follow shadows into anonymity.

This sort of truth can only be found in the golden motes of fleeting life.  The sort of truth that's a forgotten memory more important than you can remember.  This sort of truth is lost as soon as I open my eyes.

You can blot out your vision of the moon with a movement of the thumb if you keep one eye held closed.  But given both eyes open, you can scarcely deny its existence.  There were those that walked around, one hand clapped over an eye, one arm outraised to block the moon out, completely amnesic or willfully ignorant of the moonbeams basking them in illuminating radiance.  It might have looked foolish, but people in denial often do.

There were those of us that wept because we tried to cup double handfuls of water where the moon resided, but we were unable to touch its reflection and our tears marred the surface of our efforts.  How were we to know that what we wanted was the mere idea of the image?  She does not exist.  We are caught between the distance dependent on this image and the desire for a proximity that would destroy it without the guarantee that what we uncover is better.

Oh the inconstant moon which we dare not swear by.  It follows us without bidding, but alters imperceptibly at a constant rate, such that we can be suddenly surprised at its diminution or how gluttonous of secrets it has gotten -- a result of solely our inattention.  I believe she wants to tell us how we can understand her better, but holds back because she knows how cheap that would render her being.  She is not afraid of revealing the secrets she holds, for she knows they are the same as ours if we would but admit to them.

I appreciate the release that's required to float in water.  There's a sort of trust in the immersion you need before the water can carry you.  What was it that allowed the first human to discover this weightlessness in liquid, this idea that there's a surrender before security?  There's more control required to walk on water, I've found.  My feet sink a half inch into the water's surface before it catches, allowing me to sprint over the sea in pursuit of the layered moon's reflection.  I run, run, run.  Each step throws back an arc of lit-up effulgence from moon water.  To say that my steps slosh would perhaps take away from the romance of it, but I think there's a joy to this solitary puddle-jumping that throws water into the face of serenity.  I think the moon understands, even as each step destroys its facade.  I hope I can be forgiven that.

How were we to know that what we wanted was to achieve a loneliness that can only be found in the company of others?  Or that once we found that, we would find that solitude was the only cure for that self-same loneliness?  We had promised each other that we would remain together for the glimpse of a beauty in the future.  We didn't want to extinguish that possibility only inherent together.  But we couldn't have known how deeply seated our future mistakes would become in the heart of the other, and how that would violate our sense of surrender and security.  How do we reconcile a promise that was made to each other's inner selves, when we were really only looking at double handfuls of water that ran out of our hands the second we tried to grasp them?

This doubt seizes me and the next step I take doesn't catch on the water's surface tension but instead sinks my entire body into the water.

And that's it.  It would be so easy to never grant surrender, to instead relegate myself to this quiet desperation that only reveals itself in vulnerable contemplation.  People in denial of the moon are not any less foolish than those that would seek it by plunging their hands into the water as if grabbing hold of a rainbow-scaled fish that is won through luck or skill acquired over time or a combination of those.

But this promise we made holds me.  Not out of an obligation or the idea of its innocent hope.  How much I would love to hide the moon, but how much more would I love to pursue it forever.  Surrender is not enough to float and so I swim, light and water pouring in rivulets from my face as I break through the surface.

Will the moon draw closer to us if we keep our eyes fixed on it?  If we draw closer to it?  There's really only one way to find out.

The statue only moved when there was someone inebriated around to see it.

This sounds like the beginning of a joke, but the truth was that the statue was rather shy.  It was a copper-burnished statue of Napoleon on a rearing stallion, with his finger pointed in the air triumphantly.  Napoleon's finger, not the horse's.  The grammatical phrasing of that earlier sentence makes it seems as if the pointing finger belonged to the horse, but we know that's ridiculous; the horse had hooves.  

Unfortunately, the sculptor had been rather careless in his measurements and had made the horse's front right leg shorter in length than its left.  You couldn't notice it when the horse was rearing, as its limbs were in a frozen flail.  But when he was walking around, the negligence caused the statue to hobble around in an unsightly manner, which made him quite self-conscious.  He was understandably more comfortable staggering around only around staggering drunks.

Of course, the fact that he didn't move in your presence unless you were past the point of buzzed really begged the question:  if a tree falls in the woods and there's no one sober around to hear it, does it make a sound at all?  And even if it does, will anyone believe you when you tell them so?

Another reason why the statue only moved in the presence of drunkards was because he rather enjoyed alarming them.  Mainly he wanted to see them act just like the people do on sitcoms, when a hobo that's slumped on the street corner can't believe his eyes, rubs them roughly, and looks askance at the bottle in his hand.  The statue rather liked formulating this suspicion between a drunk man and his moonshine wherein only a sort of fuzzy warmth and sweet comfort had existed formerly.  All good relationships, after all, require a little bit of doubt.

He didn't want to alarm them to the point of making them give up alcohol completely.  If his actions turned out to be more effective than Prohibition, then no one would get drunk.  And then no one would see him move.  And despite it all, he wanted to be seen.

There's something to be said about being regarded in amazement.  Not just to be glanced at, but to be marveled at or to have your presence make a palpable impact on another soul.  Very few people have ever felt truly looked at, and it usually takes a singularly special individual in your life to make you feel genuinely seen.

So when a drunkard was trailing home in the wee hours of the morning/night past the town square, the statue would scrabble like a crab down from its perch and scuttle unevenly across the cobblestones, much to the alarm of many a man or woman there to witness it in action.

Despite all its fun however, the statue did find its imposing existence rather lonely at times.  As much as he was seen or marveled at, his existence was never taken very seriously and his sentience was more often than not doubted, which is a very difficult way to live.

But what was a poor, painfully shy statue to do?

You're flattered until you understand how conflict averse he is.  He listens, he smiles, he asks after you mostly because he wants to keep the peace.  There's something in him that withers at the thought of hurting you.  That's why you see that he pays attention to you out of an inherently selfish fear of argument.

And yet you stay with him.  There's something compelling about that constancy in a lifeworld that grows dim and gathers cold cobwebs.  There's something about an immutable being that you want to cling to.  Death grasps wildly at life with a jealous, desperate abandon just as life slides to fit death's curves, replete with the knowledge that it draws power from how close and how ultimately inevitable death is.

How death wants to possess life!  How much it wants to keep life for itself and yet painfully comprehends how that would bastardize it.  Death does not want to obliterate life.  It wants to swallow it whole:  keep it within and yet retaining its undigested verve and meaning.  But once it swallows life, life no longer exists...it becomes a thin phantasm whose existence depends solely on another's interpretive memorandum.  Even Hades understands that he can't keep Persephone by his side always.  Does he release her because he truly loves her?  Or does he release her only after she fades annually, merely for the sake of experiencing what she could be again -- the one he first fell in love with?  Does he release her only because he knows she is indentured to return?

Immutable.  There's something hopeless and wondrous about the idea of a being that can't be erased.  Can't be silenced.  Perpetuating independently because it doesn't need you to exist.  And so you wrap your limbs around him in an effort to draw warmth and light into your own being.

He doesn't like how you feel, but he allows it because he knows he will remain long after you have changed and vanished.  He allows it because he doesn't wish to hurt you.  Deep down in your cold center, you know how little he likes to be touched by you.  You know that with him, you will end up waning without ever being truly seen.  How you wish he wouldn't forget you the way you will forget him.  Can you live with that sort of dark allure that will forever house light and beauty?

//
A note about this writing blurb.  I tend to sit down at my laptop to write these out spontaneously.  Sometimes there's a sentence or a feeling in my head, or inspiration is prompted by something I've seen earlier.  What results is a small blurb that usually doesn't have form or a plan before I type it out.  Work at the cafe was a bit slow today, so this blurb is actually my first time in a while trying to write something out on paper.  I'm not sure which I'm more comfortable with at this point -- free-typing or free-writing.  It's worth exploring in the future, I suppose.

We push off from the dock, our paddles scything through the water smoothly.  The sky, the water, the world opens before us.  But ahead of me, I see your back.  Stark angles of your shoulders arching with each stroke.  For one glimpse, you turn back for a brief cut scene, your face framed with the horizon in front, an eye squinted while you smile.  And then you're faced forward again, away from me.

I match you stroke for stroke so we can glide forward in that opaquely clear water.  But really I want that glimpse backwards again.  I'm the one that can see you, but I'm the one that's uncertain of whether you're actually with me.  Like Euridice trailing behind Orpheus as we ascend to the land of the living.  Do you resist looking backwards because you know you'll lose me in an effort to reassure yourself?  Or have you forgotten that you came down to the underworld only to draw me out?

Sometimes when we're together, I put forward a finger to lightly touch your skin.  Some small connection.  Some small proof you exist.  Some small reassurance.  To ask directly for that substantiation from you would invalidate it.  So I content myself with a finger on your shoulder.  A brief hand brushing your elbow.  A forehead pressed to your cheek.  Enough to know that you're there.  Not enough that it's oppressive.

Grasping to keep it will only make it crumble slip out of being.  Like teeth degenerating in my mouth while I dream, insecurities and hidden hopes that will only reveal deformity when I open my mouth to speak them.  And so I drink in the sight of your back in front of me.  The sky, the water, the world opens before us.  Thinking of the future makes the present tenuous, wavering.  There's a fear that what's to come will corrupt what I have in my hands now, this paddle that matches you stroke for stroke/the bright full awareness thrill of my finger on a body angle.  It's a foreboding that distorts this ethereality.  It's a self-fulfilling prophetic vision.  But is the Cassandraic doom inevitable whether it's shared or not?

I want to tie a golden thread to your wrist, but even as you meander through your maze, there's no guarantee you'll follow it back to escape.  And even if you emerge from your labyrinth, you'll find yourself tethered to an inanimate solipsistic container.

Ahead of me now, I see your back.  And then, once more, you give me that glimpse backwards.  This time, the dipping sun is behind you, casting your features into a gloaming.  And I know that if I tried to take a picture of this moment, the lens would be blinded by that surrounding light and your silhouette would be darkness, like a cutout or an absence of being at this time.  As if someone removed you from me.  It wouldn't capture your eyes, your expression, or the way you're looking at me.  This sharp vision is already gathering indistinction from the instant it happens, but I don't try to hold it closer.  I don't grieve over the fact that it's here or gone or past or disappearing or hold in thrall that this moment could never be duplicated, remanufactured for any reason.


Instead, I put out a hand as if to block out some of that light behind you before reaching out a finger to touch you right there in the shoulder.

Tell me what your memories are tinged with.  Does the impetus of our severance loom too massively?  Separated by only a thin line, perhaps hate's sincerity eclipses what came before.  

Or has the fuzziness of the moon's convalescence swathed me in some unattainable glory?  We look at each other as mirrored reflections and make the same movements, but our actions contradict one another even as we are trapped to the same history.

It's all right if my misery was intwined in your perception of bliss or that our ending was an adamantine acquiescence.  Breathe softly to preserve the beauty of what we had and don't let it be torn asunder by those knife-sharp jabs where our imperfection wasn't something tenderly human but was instead something that compulsively wounded.  Time will soften out the edges, perhaps even rubbing out details that previously suffocated.  Remember that first irresistible private smile.  But remember that last released goodbye that had more relief in it than you would admit at the time.

It's an old filigreed world you hold in your hands.  It's much simpler to let it be as it is, but how much more whole will you be when you allow those cracks to occur in your one-way glass perception of what we had.  I've never been good at playing the damsel in distress, but it's only fair to have a turn in being the villain and the hero, the cop and the robber.  But really, aren't we all sympathetic villains, a Mr. Freeze with good intentions?

And only when you allow your mythology fracture, only then you can finally allow yourself to be the hero of the story.  Or possibly you can surrender to the confession that you were the sinner after all.  Because when you were unable to forgive me and because you wrapped me in your inability to ask for my forgiveness, you didn't understand that your guilt bound us even closer together in a tender prison.

It's all right though.  It took two to conceive the tango, and who's to say who was the leader, or whether our answer to that question even matches?  Only when you see we were matching step for step can you finally let it go.

Only then can you release yourself.

When they met, she was unhappy, but she told him how happy she was.  So he thought that was her happy look -- slightly lowered lashes to hide words she'd never say, a quirk of the mouth to keep those words locked away.

And every time he asked her if she was happy, she'd say yes with that word, those lashes, that mouth.  And he believed her.  It came to be that she could look at him, the truth full in her eyes...and it didn't matter anymore.  He didn't see it because it wasn't his truth; it was only her truth that she had never shared with him.

He was devastated when she left him.  She had tried to adopt his truth, but how can you be happy with someone when his happiness is founded in your melancholia?  It wasn't his fault; the way she had started it had corrupted it from the start.

A corruption so profound she didn't understand why every time his hand closed over hers, it felt like an oppressive vise squeezing over her heart.  

In the end though, she couldn't accept that this was how it was supposed to be.

When they met, she was happy, but she couldn't tell him how happy she was.  So he thought that she had no place for him -- her with the lowered lashes that would keep her feelings on guard, a hand over the mouth to hide that unbidden smile to spill words that until then had been so hard.

And every time he asked her if she was happy, she was too full to the brim to speak or maybe too scared to say yes with that word, those lashes, that mouth.  And he believed her.  It came to be that she could look at him, the truth full in her eyes...and it didn't matter anymore.  He didn't see it because it wasn't his truth; it was only her truth that she had never shared with him.

She was devastated when he left her.  He had tried to adopt her truth, but how can you be happy with someone when she keeps her happiness close to her out of fear?  It wasn't his fault; the pattern she had started had corrupted it from the start.

A corruption so profound that whenever his hand closed over hers, he felt despair cloud his heart because he was never sure enough of whether her happiness answered his.

In the end, he couldn't accept that this was how it was supposed to be.

//picture found on izmeister's tumblr, as always.

There are these moments when I look at you, and I wish I could capture you.  Put this memory away so that one, five, fifteen years from now, I can pull it out like something rustled in the tissue paper of shivering wings and unwrapped with a crinkle whisper.

Kept like some sort of incorruptible secret I'd never have to share.  What our pressed palms feel like, the lines of my life intersecting, bisecting, hemisecting against yours.  Me looking at you looking at me looking at you.  The light.  The shadows.  The sound of a sigh that leaves you fulfilled even as it empties.  The smell, which will lie unbidden until it's later released with a euphoria of inexplicable nostalgia that carries the feeling even if not the image.

What could I do in this moment?  I want to hold it close even as it susurrates out of my fingers.  It's like tripping toward fog, trying to fly through it, only to have it disappear the closer you draw to it

It's an impossibility, and the sadness of that reality savors of happiness too.

Because it's something I hesitate to even put into words.  This is you and this is me and nothing like this has ever happened before in the history of man.  Putting it into words makes it accessible.  Something tangible that can now be used to explain another relationship, another time, another moment in the future.  And that's not what this is.

This is a moment.  Passing.  Brief.  Never to occur again.  It's not even fully yours or mine or ours.  But it could never belong to anyone else except us.  It's a gift of a moment we're allowed to experience only because we have to release it immediately.

And the devastating beauty of entropic evanescence is that as it ends here's another moment.  Another.  Another.  Each coalescing, each slightly different.  Each one worthy of reverence but not in supplication of it.  Each moment singular and yet blurring together to create a zoetropic flutter of this time I have with you.

Here's a moment.  Here.  And here.

Sometimes after a heavy rain, there are large translucent puddles left on the ground.  They reflect the stretching trees, the azure sky, or the tops of arching skyscrapers above them.  But mottled on the ground in the midst of mud or sidewalk concrete, they look like gateways to another world.

Exit my world.  Enter yours.

I could jump into a puddle and fall into another reality.  Like a singularity.  Like Gandalf hurtling down and through the earth in a battle that stretches and transforms him beyond his comprehension.

I had a dream last night that I was stretched out in bed on top of someone.  He wasn’t mine and I wasn’t his, but there was a complete feeling of bliss and completion being there.  And we looked at each other, and he knew it as well as I did.  And that was the perfection – that words were unnecessary to understand we were in the same place.  And then he got up and left.

When I woke up, that feeling was still tangible enough to grasp…even if I couldn’t remember who it was that had created it.

Sometimes we’re lucky enough to have these poignant moments of recognition.  And I don’t think it’s something we outgrow or something experience and cynicism can squash.  I think regardless of how we feel or who we think we are, sometimes these moments just take us.  Sometimes you’re taken by how I’m looking at you.

There’s an undeniable magic to this attraction of one soul to another, even if it’s only for the briefest moments.  There’s a salt to unrequited affection, when one heart tries to open another, when someone’s solitude is filled with the sweet absence of glances.

To catch that glance is to get caught, even if for only the smallest pause in time.

I think too many answers are lost because they’re not given enough time or space to become true.

Right now, I’m hurtling through this space and time.  I’m not sure which way is up or where I’m transfiguring to.  I could be apprehensive, analytical, in denial, confused, devastated.

But it would be a shame to not enthrall the freefall.

Exit my world.  Enter yours.

Sometime soon, we’ll be in the same place again.  And I’ll take enough time and space to become true.

//as always, pictures inspired the words and they're ones I saw on my sister's tumblr.