All the bitter memories hidden in the depths of your mind come to the surface: separations from friends, women’s smiles which have faded, hopes which have lost their wings like moths and of which only a grub remains – and that grub had crawled on to the leaf of my heart and was eating it away.
-Kazantzakis
For the longest time, it seemed too much to swallow: it was bound to choke a body.
But now it seems it’s caught that body, it is that body, coming through the rye.
And in the glowing atmospheric writhe of it all, there is something so flippant, something lost like a loosed wagon careening down a hillside, lost to propriety, barreling towards an aspen grove, or perhaps an icy snowbank, where the precious cargo – precious insofar as it is only personal – will be retrieved no more, but maybe…maybe it doesn’t need to be retrieved.
I am drowning/there is no sign of land/you are coming down with me/hand in unlovable hand/and I hope you die/I hope we both die…
-The Mountain Goats, “No Children”
And if I never see You again, or never hear a word, or you ship off to Russia where you’re killed in the next revolution, or if we all evolve and sit on pyramids, drinking wine and blood to the dawning of Aquarius (or even Sagittarius) and skin our bellies with knives with handles made of bone, until our inner organs become outer and we watch as the life drips crystalline out the old sack, indifferently – or we sing and get drunk and take showers in popcorn, knowing full well that somebody else will have to clean up our messes…
It is a Landmark moment, when we all fall in, melting to part with something, some one, and they hold us in with desperately clenched muscles while we smile warmly and kiss them on the nose. We cut through the noise and cease to suffer because it was all upon a stage all along and now, we’re just tired: the show is over, we’ve changed out of our costumes (though our make-up is still on because either you take it all off or you appreciate the spectacle and go out with the eyeshadow still darkening your complexion) and now with a fur shawl and a cigarette in hand, we go out for a bottle of red wine and drink it slowly together, in two separate glasses without really saying much.
It’s not a question of dreaming. It’s not a question of trying, or even a question of living for anything. It was a dream before we even died. It tried us and we were just there to digest the bruises. And living is an intransitive verb.
After six months, when I came home one evening, I couldn’t find her anywhere. She’d gone. A handsome soldier had just arrived in the village and she’d run off with him.
-Zorba
And now I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.
I sat out on the cobbled beach watching the waves crack dark and chilly. I felt that somewhere on the other side of the clouds, the sun was preparing to set, though I could not see it and the light had taken on a neutrality that robs it of any further suggestion. Then I thought of how the sun doesn’t prepare for anything; in fact, it doesn’t even move, really.
Somewhere over my shoulder, in a little copse of trees, there were some fireflies, jumping the gun a little in their own impatient way, looking to light up a world that for the time being, had plenty of existent grey light to go round. I looked out into the water, which was a mirror at a different time but now was too rough to convey anything but empty static. It surrounded our little island, uniformly, indifferently; and from a distance, I could just barely make myself out, a tiny tiny insect, attempting to light-up an already greylit world with a little light on my anus: straining and flailing, gasping for breath, and then suddenly, finally, letting it slip away, awash in the smells of the forest, away, alone as a cedar, wreathed in salt, cold and damp…but peaceful.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRP6egIEABk
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