A great love is a great feeling and a great truth.
Is it summer yet?
It’s already late. I’m headed home or at least its general direction. I’m enjoying myself too much. I can’t think of a single thing I’d want to busy myself with inside that tired, old shoebox that’s my apartment. The sun came out late today. It’s now beaming with such brilliance. It showers and hugs me. At arm’s length. I wish I could write you. I wonder where you are.
I’m taking the long way around again, to see if I see you, but of course I never do. But better not to see you in the daylight than not to see you in the dark. At times I still wish I’d run into you again, the way I used to. No, what I wish for is that, for once, maybe you’d run into me too.
I think of you often. But when I try to picture you, I see nothing. Nothing but warm, fuzzy red from under closed eyelids, where nothing can harm me. And how badly that beautiful light would sting me, were I to open my eyes at this very moment. Instead, I think back, about another late afternoon, another day. One where I wrote myself a letter. No, I wrote you writing me a letter. You won’t remember, you weren’t there, and of course I’m not telling you this now either.
I would read it in your voice, the letter, as if you’d been speaking to me, and I was being spoken to, by you. Us two, alone in your home; the dark and cold keyhole to which soon enough, I will long to return. There were never any claims to truth, only that one tiny, misshapen aperture, looking out on an ugly world; a grimace. Mine or yours, it all bled. Appalled, we covered our mouths. You were telling me all the things I was thinking, as if somehow you’d read my mind, cover to cover, leaving me all hollowed out and spread apart, what’s mine now yours. All the things I never told you, or anyone, as if you’d known all along. But as it went on, you increasingly began falling over your words. You’d been afraid with my fear. Because I was. By halfway, they grew uncontrollable, slip-sliding up the sides and inevitably over, then trailing off. At first only a little, and then suddenly falling completely silent. I couldn’t.
It’s dumb, I know what I want to say, but I can’t even take one breath.
You track circles in the folds of my brain, my brain turned over as if tilled, its grooves deeper with every round. You echo and it is piercing but of course ultimately aimless. Like the fly at night while I lie in bed those six faces looming over me, your image colliding with every one of them, until I can’t think of anything else. Sometimes, I refuse to move, because I’m afraid something horrible might happen if I do. Then, I hold my breath and listen for you. You echo always the same words, words to a song I try to forget, always the same words I don’t want to hear; the things you actually said. Always the same expressions, the same gestures, the same big eyes looking anywhere else. You echo seemingly without end, but of course there must be one.
It will come. For some time, a good while, I had grown so deep into myself that it seemed as if I wouldn’t ever be able to do without, anymore. No, not you, but what you leave behind, the long shadows you cast. I don’t think that anymore, I like to think. Some might say I came around. I wouldn’t. No one ever really grows up, we just grow old. Because, my darling sock puppet, the only reason I’m sane is because I know you want me to be. No, you never thought about it at all, I’d almost forget. I can only guess that’s what I wanted. I act in my own interest, only for the sake of someone else, someone who doesn’t exist and never did. I don’t have the heart, or a mind of my own.
And so, maybe that’s why I fashion fake mouths, collect them and keep them neatly in a shoebox, where I’ll go and lie next to them, then wait for curtains close.
I like the idea of talking to you. I would’ve liked to be your friend, is what I tell myself. But really, I don’t like who I am around you. Funny. Isn’t regret just so terribly convenient a feeling? There can’t always be a lesson, I’d better blame it on you. Probably for the best. What’s better for me will have to be what’s better for you.
I don’t know why I’m turning red. It’s the Sun. They say the stuff’ll kill you, but do I listen?
I’m always talking to you only by talking to others. If it’s not one, it’s another. Through cautious squints and tight lipped, just to hear it out loud, so I can pretend it’s more than only in my head, something real, something tangible and of the world, something I could simply reach out for and hold in my two hands, if only I just tried a little harder. But of course I know better than to try.
I have things to do.
Forgive me, star, it’s time to sleep.
