Wine (Part XX)

The exorcism begins here, where I will write the pages & pages trying to grip, hold and mold what happened to me. Well, what used to happen to me; that is, what used to drive the letters to no-one and make my every other day a feast for the senses. All I'm left with now is a feast for the intellect, a little descriptive mind-space where something needs to be personally memorialized. I'm left thinking: why did I ever try to do what I did not know, why, sir, did you pretend that human impulse came out of nowhere? you probably read too many authors who described emotional pain with inadequate understanding. Redemption is not a turn in the plot when the playwright gets tired. Redemption is a drawing in of threads to make a knot. Where am I going with this? I'm still trying to find somehting I know. And for that I havr to start with something I feel--something that has been anathema for so long. That something was your loneliness. I felt it in your cavernous rooms. I felt your world-tiredness as you lay on your bed, your sinews absolutely still. I thought then you looked peaceful, and it only occurred to me as I left you, as I pulled out my book & started to read (but really I was giving my mind the order to wander) that you weren't peaceful--you were insensate. You had pulled up a mesh screen to protect a flickering flame in your center, and this meant I could never try to tempt the flame--I would be cut by the mesh. I failed to see a lot of other things too. I failed, as only a modern fails, to see weather-cues, to see the evocation of the wind turning every tender caress into a rough push, a tendon-snapping grip that left you numbed and prickly; I failed to see the rain as the washer-away of memory; it plasterred out hair to our shoulders and we were left shivering and dumbly looking at each other in that theatrical-movie pose I never understood. When the cockroach awoke me in the night, it might as well have been you. Your fingers tracing the lines of my ribs felt exactly like the six piston legs of a biting-eating-surviving machine. I should have seen symbolic quality everywhere: shopping for bedding as I stood dreaming by the doorway, or descending into labyrinths of ants and moths and plate mail and armor and kobolds. I talked to you freely, open-book style and got as far as your right shoulder. In my mind I was already resting my arm on your back as you lay there insensate. You would shift and open up some room for me to lie down, and that would be the afternoon. That, or we'd lie intertwined in a bowl-chair. I would finally climb out of that symbolic basement and the imps of the underworld would stop stealing my clothes (symbolically). I would foist my mannerisms onto you, and I'd walk away in the end wiser and broader. But as I said, I failed to see what anyone else would see; I failed to tap into my broad anddeep reservoir of foolishness. And this is why I'm left writing for redemption. This is why I seek out toppling fire escapes and stand atop them, taking pictures of the street in the hope that I'll see you aroun the next corener and you would yell for me. But so few of us ever bother to look up. I don't want to make you slip on ice. I'll come down eventually, once my rat-face begins hurting from the 10th-story windchill.

Consider: "I have read descriptions of Paradise that would make any sensible person stop wanting to go there."