for Xian
This is a love story.
(He lifts the small stack of notes, turns it in his hands and begins to laugh. From a distance, familiar music limps slowly by. Smoke is present, somehow.)
Of course you give yourself more credit than you deserve with some things and not enough with others…I suppose I must tell you: you are completely shattered. Interned. A month back or a weak back, in transition.
Where there is no space to put lines into the lips of the Other of which this suggestion of solution recalls. With a prick of pepper.
This is a love story: The real thought. Abstracted, engaged in arabesques, as seen through a stained glass basin or a whiskey bottle. Ha ha ho ho and hee hee.
By then it had come to the honesty of resignation. No longer was there space for apprehension. (Well understood she turned to he, coat wrapped tight in the late winter night, and said nothing. Black teeth and eyes turned inward in words, she thought: it will go on or it will flip into its opposite. And he stepped backward two steps, turned forward and rehearsed. A call to the wing for his line! From the fly, it falls, he is called in recollective-)
-I'm sorry for your pain but even your pain is the pain of letting go of something, some idea of me which was never true.
-Of course it was never true. But that's not the point. The point was when you held me, don't you see? Ideas declarations, ideological epiphanies: ornaments to an essential something. Props. When we began beyond words, what claims could they ever have restored?
-We began beyond words but it didn't take long for you to need them. You think you say things better and so convince yourself you sound right. But I'm right about things you can't say.
-I think we both knew that all along.
This is a love story.
-But I meant it. It meant something.
-My pride. It hurts my pride while the CD proceeds to begin again…wait, sorry. (Turns to his left and looks into the drowning white of the flood light) Should I shift my shoulders like such…I remember it saying something about a reminiscence of Scene 3? (There is no answer) How about if I- (He trails off) Nevermind.
-Who are you talking to?
-Ghosts: memories. A line I once woke to, 'ourselves oursouls alone at the sight of salvocean'. In shifting descriptions, mostly nulled in economics. I send out waves, you know. Not free. More words than I can handle to say something so still. A heart overheard.
-I doubt that you're talking to me. Here, I'll show how it works. This is me talking to you: Would you like some wine?
-Do you mean in the Eucharistic sense?
-You always do this.
-It's who I am.
-It's a show.
(Pause)
-This is a love story.
-You're just saying that.
-I love you.
-You're just saying that. Must we be so contrived?
-As fictional characters, yes. Purely operational.
-Through which lens?
-Either my eye or a camera. I'm not entirely sure it makes a whole lot of a difference.
-One has no tape.
-One has no knowledge of what happens backstage.
-Please don't start with that again. You have no right to it.
-Exclusive rights isn't love, it's colonization. And I for one am too close to that tale, the people I love fucked yours while a certain part of you joined with half of me in fucking me until I was, what was the term you used? Shattered?
-That wasn't me and you're trying too hard to force words into unfamiliar territories. They don't deserve that. You're being violent.
-Does it matter?
-You're such an asshole.
But this is a love story. Though, granted, there's too many people writing this…I wont be the person who…(They appear, younger, confused, crying with unnecessarily wild eyes, throughout the scene they appear to be grasping vaguely for an explanation to justify something that clearly neither of them is fully cognizant of)
-What did he say?
-It doesn't matter. Why do you care?
-Only that I care. Tell me!
-He told me what he was, what he needed, and that it - all of it - would be out of need. Care about that.
-I love you.
-I don't care anymore.
-Can't we put ourselves, oursouls back to a time when you did?
-You can't put things back. They wont go back. And besides, you don't really mean that.
-How can you say something like that.
-It's either wax poetic in insincerity, or tell it all and sound banal. Even now, you're trying to write a play. (With all due drama, she moves her eyes in huge sweeping circles around the general proximity)
-I've never written a play in my life.
-But you've played at writing…Damn it, what’s the point? You'd only wonder if I was lying.
-You don't need to open your mouth for me to wonder that. Look, what do we have left?
-What an asinine question. And you began it as a statement.
-A lot of things in my life start out as statements and end as questions. Just as a lot of things begin as quotes and end as confessions. It's something fails us- I mean me. Look, I love you, so use me. Be indulgent, negligent, preoccupied, premenstrual…your credit is infinite. I'm yours. I'm committed…It's no trick loving somebody at their best. Love is loving them at their worst. Is that romantic? When you met me I was at my best. When you rediscovered me, my worst. In the darkness of my aspect you recalled the only time you had to recall and it was my best: the day you fell in love. But that day, or I should say night, that night I was fallen. First we feel, then we fall, it's something fails us, like I said before-
-Shut up, shut up! Words words words, that's why you're still a preacher. An entire life time of bargaining, the rises and falls. God, you haven't even managed to write my voice right.
-Does that bother you?
-No, it just tells me more about you than it could even begin to tell you about me.
-Of course it doesn't bother you. I have a confession to make.
-What's new in that?
-Bear with me. It used to bother me that you were never bothered. Then I realized I found consolation in that. You were never bothered because I could never be bothersome. You held me even when I was nowhere near. You understood my limitations and that freed me to take you as you were: personal, final, uncompromised. I never asked too much of you-
-Not with your mouth, which was too studied for that. But you can't study the stars with a magnifying glass.
-It's to do with knowing and being known: the mask slipping from the face. I tried something different with you. No mask. Ever.
-You still don't get it do you.
-Get what?
-Masks. There's no such thing as a mask. Just as there's no such thing as a lie.
This is still a love story. Someone said it turned out to be biology after all. Ha ha ho ho and hee hee. But it couldn't be recalled. (They were young then, lost in love and literature. Worlds of words.)
-I know.
-Of course you do.
-No…I mean, I know.
-Cute.
-Cute? Can't you just once play along and cut me some slack here?
-With what? I know when and where you heard that. Stories. Replications. When will you stop trying?
-Tomorrow - I mean yesterday - I mean…mercy, honeybaby.
-Tell me something. What is it that you want?
-Only you…and happiness.
-And you think the right script will bring both of those to you?
-Maybe, but here I'm working backwards, revealing all my plot devices before I have occasion to use them. There's got to be something to that, right?
-You still think it's a math equation, don't you. Listen, this is not the kind of thing you solve in a fit of mental exertion. Neither is it something that passes unmistakably over your doorstep. You don't get visited with happiness like being lucky with the weather. The weather is the weather.
-I'm talking about infidelity.
-No you're not. You're talking about self-knowledge through masochism.
-Can you at least throw me a bone and call it sadism?
-No I can't because it doesn't bother me.
-Once again, never bothered. Your nerves are Virgo syntacta.
-That doesn't remotely fit there.
-I'm trying to distract you. (He runs a full palm across her faces, ostensibly to pass a message through to her, but actually just to feel the warmth of her head: a souvenir.) What did you think when you saw me?
-Always changing the subject for no good reason.
-Come on, we both know that the subject is arbitrary or else it's utterly eternal. Whatever we're talking about there's always only one thing we're talking about. Will you please just humor me this one time.
(Pause…acquiescence)
-When I saw you? What did I think? Do you mean just now?
-No, on the first day.
-We already talked about that.
-You know I'm not asking to gain any new information. (From the left wing the STAGE MANAGER walks on with an enormous clapper. He or she reaches the center of the stage and slams it shut, creating a resounding CLAP)
This is about to become a love story. (Time has clearly receded. His facial hair is shorter and her clothes, formerly worn like an old relationship, seem newer, brighter, more elastic)
-I think I remember now. My word was PITY and yours was SAVAGE. He took them and rearranged them into PIETY and RAVAGES. Get it? Pity is savage, it ravages piety. And what I asked you about on the futon in the East Village?
-They were just words then as they remain now.
-There is no such thing as just words. Either that, or all words are just, and enunciation is a form of justice.
-What's your point?
-This love, this life is a matter of aesthetics, genred and organized organic, Dewey drops of decimated similes: all evocations a stage and the long road ahead. Here we are just beginning but we have signs, readings, anything and everything in God's Three Gorgeous Damn's world to make of it. You say I take things like this too seriously, we'll you're absolutely wrong, or right. I'm not sure anymore. It's not important. Read the future in the stars, they'll describe whatever you've got in your head. I don't know how to write love. I try to write it and it just comes out embarrassing. Maybe I'm just embarrassed with my self, my thoughts, maybe not. I'm just looking for the real stuff, some thing. I've got a hell of a lot to figure out, or just a hell of a load to simply let drop. That's where you come in. Either you're with me or you're…no, that's not the point either. Complete ourselves and meet halfway. Not that either. There's no time for that because I love you now and pretty soon you'll be gone. How about we drop the pages, drop the books, drop the knowing, drop the stories, drop everything and make love. But not make love because it will be perfect or even good, but because we have nothing else to do but to try, to force it, to lock ourselves in a room, oursouls in a room, at the sight of salvocean, and stare at each other until we merge and then go separate ways or never part…(He suddenly gets extremely embarrassed and begins talking very quickly, apparently in an effort to speed to the end of this moment of his life and presumably thereby escape some of its pain) Look, I'm not saying this very well. I'm not trying to convince you to…in fact I think, really I'd be rather indifferent to whether or not you…I just want…not even that, it's just that…being there-
-Come on, please - it doesn't have to be like this. (She takes his hand and his demeanor calms. He seems to have more to say, to attempt to clarify, but she silences him and gently leads him off the stage)
This is a love story. Ha ha ho ho and hee hee.
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