Nothing makes sense
Nothing makes sense in the mess of surroundings. Things are real when they are alone, with their essence bound. A description of the most recognizable element of my life could drag on without end because where ever it slips to in space it is never without the magnetic collection of my surroundings. It hasnt ever mattered to me why or how things end up together, on a shelf, drifting in the gutter, but what they are, what they look like in a place, not how they move, but how they pose when they are still. This vision makes time useless. I dont want to see new things, but with juxtapositions that I cannot avoid, new moments will ceaselessly appear. Everything is still in the apartment. I move through it lining things up in my vision. I kneel so that the cooled, empty mug of tea floats above her head. I close an eye so that the slope of her shins under the dress follows the strike of light across the far wall from the lamp. The flower pattern on her dress from beneath the window, where light leaks in from the street in a powder, is luminous. It flattens her. I give these things to her or leave them with her, or leave her and them together, after me. From the hallway, with one eye free into the room, I can see only her bare feet on the carpet. Her legs cross the jamb of the front door beyond as they slope up to her knees and then I am behind the wall that leads back to the bedroom and bathroom and then she is gone and the apartment is gone with my absent visions of them both. I think they are still there, but now that they have been, there is no reason for them to be again, not tonight, not in this order reversed. I slip into the bathroom. A bathroom, alone.
This was the first time I had lived this way, or at all, with everything deferred. I have known about it all. It was clear from the start what would happen and where and when it would happen. But in the midst of obstacles, familiar things becoming foreign that couldnt be avoided as the city swelling with lives each night grew around me, what I thought would be early white noons, or long mornings, or slow dusk, became a perpetual night of curtains and windowless rooms. The things that I knew would happen still did happen. They happened in the apartment, in the dark, or apart from me while I laboured upon time and geography. I thought that I was catching myself and falling back into a sequence where the impending moments were caused to follow, if not by my actions, at least by something old that I couldnt know. But each of those last moments, as I folded myself into sleep, where I saw everything in sequence, was a chain of waste, with no cause, because there was no me in those moments, only what I had surrounded myself with. Only this moment and the ones that it causes are where I am and will be. I can work backward from the end and find myself here, but not back to each other night. I had never slept in my life. Each night was a waking disappearance, a purposeful relinquishing of will in order to remain surrounded, and not to become something. I am afraid now, to face these moments, just a few, that I am causing. My fear is not paralyzing. It is heaviness that grows from inside, it doesnt crush, it is expansive. It is inside me, but the fear is not mine, it is of the desert, of emptiness. Its sands fill my chest. Each breath draws in more sand. I am being crushed from the inside and with the heaviness I dont explode; I fall to the floor. My fear is living in each moment. I am alive in the bathroom, in the dark in the back of the apartment. I know that. I dont fear the cascade of shadows that my body will lose in the dark, I dont have fear; it is present here with me. If i look back, the reluctance to let the end begin was not out of fear, it just didnt have the cause. I didnt have to discover it, I had to let it happen.
