Bones
The wind recalls what the body forgets.
The pendulum swings, but I can’t hear the seconds pass. All is silent, tiny and at a far remove. Time passes for other people, but not for you. As he grows older, the world around him grows smaller. You prostrate ever taller in the evening sun now almost entirely gone.
I am stretching impossibly thin, and it’s torture to be sure, but it’s a torture I want to believe in. It’s the only hope of which I know. You want this torture to exist. You need to affirm its existence more than finding a happiness of your own. Happiness isn’t the most important thing.
I hear a voice in the howling of the wind. Itself not based in matter, it doesn’t conform to the movements of human lips. The voice cracks like thunder and lashes from my every corner. It’s the collective voice of all right-thinking people become one. “We love decency and despise truth,” we howl. And you do too. We decree: “No more bugs under rocks or stars in the sky!” but our co-conspirators mistake their mouths.
I watched young dogs when I was young. They were given bones to gnaw to strengthen their teeth. Those of you whose teeth have fallen out did not chew on bones. This is my advice...
There’s so much beauty in the world, we fear there might be too much. It’s become hard to tally. It’s overwhelming. He is afraid to lose. I am afraid to give up what little I have, but I have to. We know we do. You miss me so much, you never want to see me again, but you don’t tell me this. Why? Sometimes the only thing to change is your way of relating to things. Forget about your fears. Everything is going to be different because we say so. Because I say it will be, it will be.
He sits with his head in his hands, too sad to cry. You were already on your way out as I came in. Where are you going now? In life, we never know what people think, we can only imagine. What is he still doing here? You try to imagine my life, imagine me. He tries to imagine you as you are. How could I? How can he pretend to trace in words her likeness? Your soft hand upon your cheek. You who are so different, so fleeting, always changing and transformed. Not the woman I imagine, but the woman who imagines, who has given life to dreams. His eyes trail, but evasively, and only a ghostly image; not her, so much as the fast-dissipating remnants of her leaving. You linger on the empty space I stood in; you already miss me. I already missed her long before she left. Before I left.
When it comes to feelings, what is real is indistinguishable from what is imaginary. The lover writes his love letter for himself, or at best, for everyone. You have fallen into repetition. I know, I’m stuck. He grows tired of seeing her in his dreams, tired of being allowed to see her only in dreams. The sun is always the same to the pianist who sang always the same.
It bears repeating that life imitates art far more than art imitates life. Art is, however, at the heart of it all, at odds with life. But we forget. We even rid ourselves of what we know, and then we convince ourselves it’s not so much that we want to die, as that we wish we had never lived.
Nobody needs to be told twice. It’s like saying, “I love you. And I mean it.” If we believed “I love you,” we certainly don’t believe it when we get the addendum. Repetition is death, but indeed all mortals today wish in some form to be dead, inert, for without pleasure there may be no pain, and the fear of pain goes right to the bone.
But I was made to fear, like softened clay in her warm hands. And it’s in this trembling that he is alive. At least you have your fear. And he wouldn’t dream of expecting more than nothing at all.
The pendulum pauses at the top of its swing, only briefly, though still long enough for time to gasp and hold its breath, clenching, before finally turning back, leaving things, once more, as they had been.
“Wait, stay like that for a moment.”
“Do you want to take a picture?”
“No.”
The pendulum swings, and in it, nigh imperceptibly: a whisper. She tells me that art is not death yet, for it stops short. It is neither simply an expression of pain, nor an impression of pain, but itself a form which creates pain. Perhaps then, it is dying. But not one of letting go slowly.
They’re inventing a new form of torture, a torture they want to believe in. It’s the only hope of which they know. It’s the magic they cannot live without. Maybe they want their lives ruined after all. They want this torture to exist and need to affirm its existence more than finding a happiness of their own. They want not to be dead, nor to have never lived, but to forever be dying.
We stop just short of the end and come to life again like flowers in water.
