love, read, write

if there is a god (not that there certainly is, but if for a moment we believed it), then maybe god is an elderly woman with kind wrinkles and a knowing smile, a familiar scent of home and nostalgia, a cup of tea between her hands. if there is a god, she is listening, observing, embracing. you’re speaking to her. you vomit out your life in front of her — full of shame, embarrassment, the occasional pride.

you are shrouded by self-pity these days. it’s getting dangerous, the amount of self-absorbed isolation you’re drowning in, indulgently, in the full glory of life’s terribleness. you are slowly isolating yourself from your friends, blindly hurting others through careless words that stem from insecurity. they’re small changes — barely noticeable, but with several months’ time, the world has shifted its tone towards you — it’s defensive, cautious. you’re something they are careful about. you feel a sense of loneliness waft up from the gaps in the flooring.

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i. 

Once, I was drinking with a friend. It was in my apartment. It was late at night — maybe around midnight? Maybe later than that. We’d known each other for a while. I believe two years counts as a while.

“You know,” she said, suddenly (I don’t remember if she was interrupting herself, or if there was a poignant silence that added weight to her next words, like they do in the movies), “sometimes, I feel like I don’t know who you are.”

“Oh?” I said. I paused.

Two years was apparently not enough for me to know what to say next. I was at a loss.

Eventually, I provided her with a very helpful, “Who I am, huh?” and then we moved on to talk about other things.

ii.

I am a Russian doll. 

Well— more specifically, I’m the Russian doll two layers in. I promise you I have friends, I just don’t know what they look like. The me that is two layers out — the representative me, perhaps — knows their names. I’m sure they are great people. I leave that to the outer me. I’m sure she knows what she is doing. I’m two layers in: it’s cozy. It’s dark. It’s safe.

There are more dolls deeper within, presumably. Maybe they also have egos, and maybe they also write their own little stories about how they are Russian dolls three layers in, or four layers. Or five, even. Might be a stretch. Regardless, that’s not my problem. I’m only aware of the two beyond me. Sometimes I’m jealous, because the outer dolls know more than me. They know the people in my life better, can recall their names better, can close their eyes and remember what they look like, whether they wear glasses, what kind of hairstyle they usually have, what kind of ice cream they like. They probably have funnier stories to tell.

I’ll admit it: I’m jealous of them. But I’m sure they already know, because I’m just a layer within them.

iii.

Occasionally, I will talk to someone, and it will be like a breath of fresh air. A little direct line to oxygen. We will talk for four hours. Five, maybe. Given that we would have time. I will feel like my words are being understood— translation-less, interpretation-less. It will be enthralling, the speed at which I will just say something and I will hear something back and there is nothing in between, no resistance to slow down the growth of an idea. I will lose myself, but in a different way than usual. My body will disappear under the transit of words, under the idea that we are nursing.

I will take the bus home afterwards. On the bus, there will be someone muttering to himself across from me, a little kid clinging to his mother’s sleeve several rows over, and a person staring at their phone leaning against the rail. I will be two stops away from getting off.

My body will disappear, again, but this time not under the benevolent transit of words, but under the hostile transit of perception.

But it is okay that I have disappeared. I will see all of this through a film — later, with popcorn. I know it sounds funny, but I can’t help it. And maybe it is easier that way. Maybe it is what makes me further away. Either way, I don’t have much of a choice.

iv.

Bathrooms cannot help it but have a mirror. In this day and age, it cannot be helped. On top of that, it cannot be helped that I see myself in that mirror. I stand there, each evening, staring at myself until my eyes blur and I start to unfurl into an unraveling roll of film. Eventually there is no reflection. It is a screen. The day reveals itself, frame by frame, until I am immersed in the spectatorship of my life.

The words I have said, the people I have met. Maybe that is what they look like, I wonder to myself. Maybe that is the life I am living.

Time:
          A body moves within
          its shell,
          squeezing through the uneven cracks
          of each shattered frame, forcefully
          morphing, refracting,
          losing skin— black, blue, black,
          blue, red.

Memory:
          A mosaic— fragmented shards
          of my body and everything else I have
          collected from the street,
          a jagged painting of
          receipts and
          film rolls pieced together with
          tacky glue, still
          showering the ground with color in the morning, but
          empty of beauty at night.

 You come to me in waves:

The first is silence. You’re invisible. For a mistaken moment, I believe you are no longer there. I move on with my life and marvel at how smoothly life continues in your absence. The calmness is unexpected; it preoccupies me, seeding a question: perhaps you were not that big of a presence. Perhaps this is a sign. Perhaps this silence was sent to deliver a message, that you were nothing, after all.

The second is the silence, held longer, turned inwards, flipped inside-out, and turned outwards. It is loud. I realize, suddenly, that for the silence to be visible I must have looked at it. The silence was not silence all along. It was an excuse to think about you while feeling above the waves, when I was not. I was under the surface, looking at the sky refracted through the movement of the tides just above me. Suddenly the silence hurts, and I dare myself to look at photos of you. It takes me less than a minute to succumb: it is two in the morning and I have looked at every photo of your beaming smile, your nonchalance blurred in a momentary capture, your silhouette against the adventures we took. The silence is gone.

The third is melancholy. I wallow in the mistake of swimming in our past, because now the ocean is blue, so incredibly blue. Not a day goes by where I wonder what you are doing, suddenly afraid that the silence I first felt is the silence you are feeling now, of me, but more truly. Have you moved on? I want to know, but I cannot, and so I continue to wade in the viscosity of my sorrow. I am addicted to photos of you, though at the surface I tell myself that I am doing it because I have moved on. That is a lie. I have not.

The fourth is an unsettling peace. Eventually, the sorrow wears thin, and the ocean is blue but transparently so; I can look up at the sky, break the surface, breathe the air. Sometimes I am back underneath, but I know how to swim upwards. It feels like silence, but I am not sure it is the same as the one I first encountered. Suddenly, I realize that the ocean is vast, that I have been wading in place, and that maybe it is time to think about swimming towards something new.