Laugh
Not to cry.
I don’t want to need anything from the grocer’s. I haven’t had dinner in days. I want a nice apartment with things in it, many things, it doesn’t matter what, not yet. I barely have anything and I fear that if I my apartment gets broken into I’d notice too much what’s missing. I want to have so many things that I won’t even be sure what they took.
It doesn’t matter, watch me spend it all in one place again. Every time I act like it’s the first time. I pretend it’s not a pattern because I want it so bad. I want a coffee with a pastry on the side, the one that’s a slice of something. You know, because I want to be part of something too. No. That one, no, the other one. This whole time I’ve been compulsively checking behind me, but the person I am looking to meet here isn’t looking to meet me too, and I am waiting for them somewhere they never go. I know this, and I know the other thing too. It doesn’t matter, I want to sit in the shade against the warm bricks, and think of nothing, talk of nothing, sit and wait for nothing, forget the past. I will not think about anything ever again.
I’m feeling self-congratulatory being here at all. This is all highly unusual for me. I don’t cook much, but I never eat out either, and you’d never see me get coffee. There’s no point in having something all by myself. It’s wasted on me, I can’t enjoy it the way others do. Let others enjoy it, they always look so happy. I’m only a tourist, I go round and round but never cross the threshold, never say hello, never ask a question. Or is that not a universal experience? Today is an exception. Any day can be exceptional and in fact, oftentimes they are.
The door squeaks and the chairs, too, scrape the floor like sandpaper to my ear drums, spoons in chipped ceramic hitting the counter, machines whirr, gasping, choking, crying, clipped round the ears. Again, and again, and again. Well, it’s a place of business. And there’s a strong coffee smell. Someone laughs, another sighs.
You never hear anyone in the movies complain about cafés being too expensive. Why would you go someplace only to complain? But you can’t listen in only when it gets good, you have to suffer the dull as well.
We prefer our pain on the outside, to sing out loud. All of the sudden I miss everyone. It’s come into leaf again as it does every year, for many years. I’ve sat in the sun for too long, my skin is peeling, it’s shedding by the sheet, growing paler again. I’ve got a rizla that reads: do you love me? A contract between unequal parties isn’t much of a contract at all, is it. Keep it inside you, or you will lose. Everyone else is crazy here too actually, rattling, itching. The old man keeps on making noises in his sleep. You were here first, I’m just here.
I let it go cold. I got it just to sit with it, here somewhere, nice and easy, look the part. But for now I’m standing up because there’s nowhere to sit. I need this prop, my ticket for when they come check on me. I want to stay here quite a while and I’m down to small change already. It’s so little it doesn’t even jingle in a nice way. Plus, I anyway can’t have it in the afternoon or I get uneasy, or rather, more uneasy. The coffee presently in my cup is made of a hard plastic. If I were to turn it over, the shiny black would stick inside the cup all the way through the movement. Fortunately for me there’s no one to challenge me on this.
This is not quite how I pictured it. It’s all not quite what I’d hoped for, but who said there was hope? I guess it’s better. I’m standing here waiting and the waiting might prove preferable to when the waiting will be over. It’s hard to tell looking forward but still we must do it. But how can I know it won’t be long, how long it will be? Tell me right now, Alice. Please, Alice!
There you were. I don’t know if I had already been feeling that way before or only after. You came out of the blue, your humps and hollows, everything you said was gospel. You placed the littlest seeds in my mind. I was a hat, and you were my hat. I wasn’t wearing my teeth, smiling like a clam, I was the happiest corpse. I had ample reason for curling up, but now I know I should’ve laughed. Someone laughed, but it hadn’t been me, though I wanted to laugh too. Not because there was anything funny to me, because there wasn’t, but maybe there would have been had I laughed.
The faceless girl seen only from the back in my dreams, a head only made up of hair, the indistinct figurine dressing herself through some far-off door left ajar. Now I’m inventing you but I do hope, as you are. I want you to be who you are, my beautiful hunchback. Why don’t you play me some piano? She brushed her nose against my cheek and whispered in my ear. She and all those like her or not too unlike her at least. Stories are rarely about things that actually happened, or not the way they truly did, or not the way they should’ve did. I never did do what I said I would. Instead here I am, empty-handed, outside looking in through a window again. I had only imagined myself a customer. Tragedy sped up becomes comedy.
I ran out of coins to put in the telescope. I guess it’s nothing then. It better have been. The best riddles don’t have answers. One might think this isn’t fair but they’d be missing the point. People love missing the point. Fair to whom? People love to come running. Who am I offending, the answers in the back of the book? The ape pretends he cannot speak so as not to be compelled to labour, thus allowing us to dream. To want is to grow teeth in the stomach, it chews you up inside. I’m going to enjoy whatever I have left. Nothing lasts, but it goes both ways. I have to make an effort. I never laugh anymore but now I can only laugh, if only so you know I was here too, somewhere beyond your eyeline.
Did you ever say yes to a single joy? Oh, my friends, then you said yes to all woe as well. All things are chained together, entwined, in love.