nothing ever breaks

23 March 2003 - 22:17

<<--unravel * reintegrate-->>

I was hungry once. A man offered me a pear. Together we admired its perfect skin, its delicate scent. I bit into it and realized it was a fabricated pear, a silk pear so artfully crafted the only way to tell it wasn't real was to taste it. Simultaneous epiphanies:
I could die of this hunger.
He is the embodiment of incomprehensibility -- he spent days making the pear to fool me for no reason at all.

I'm learning to accept wordless communication, the kind that comes from the sun glinting off the empty chair in front of me. I'm learning to be silent. To point out the duplicity of a silk pear is to give away too much of myself; sometimes stating what is in front of you is a form of nonacceptance, a wish it weren't so.

I asked another once, Please don't ever stop killing me.
Those words hung in my bedroom until my next lover.
I said to him, 'You've killed me. There's nothing else. You've killed me. What are you going to do now?'
He plucked the words out of the air, whispered them sweetly, 'Keep killing you.'

I want to believe the way he was with me is how he'll someday be, when we're all much further along. The problem is, if your sickness is imitating health, how can anyone ever know when you're well?

"You're still in love with him, aren't you?"
"I'm still in love with him, yes."
"You'd get back together with him in a second."
"No, never."
Both of them, in unison: "You would."
In any other world, they would be right. But my motivation for happiness is both one and two. So today I took down his picture, put the belongings he left behind where I can't see them, washed my sheets. I will walk straight up a wall if it is the fastest way to where I'm going.

<<--unravel * reintegrate-->>