I am officially out of steam. I’ve officially eaten all the things. I’ve officially hit tonight with all the force of a bullet train. The heat from this laptop is cooking my internals, but here we must remain until we have finished tonight’s post which is sitting here on the table, shivering, awaiting the treatment and to be slotted into place.
I just need to get away from all my cravings and misgivings and bad faith and just sleep. Sleep, holy sleep, has been in such short supply lately that I’ve been thinking that I am being warped into parabolas by the void left in its absence.
***
I walked by your old building today, briefly touched the wall as I passed as though you’d left some dust of yourself, some magic there My arms were full, but I reached out and let my fingertips just stroke the mortar, the paint daubed on by men long before you and will remain well after your predecessor and his operations have been dismantled.
I don’t know why I can still feel you here, why I still observe the calendar with some urgency as if we are approaching anniversaries where we would surely need to meet and celebrate. Me in my horrible dress, you in that wrecked shirt. I give you up to the wind and the earth draws you back and spits you into my path. This is no great destiny, but you gave me comfort and purpose once. A sly purpose, adverse to the great Battle Hymn of the Republic. You, this Jean Valjean in my mind, you were at war with things well beyond me.
Though, perhaps the same could be said of me.
Again, we’ll never compare these notes. We’ll never know what character I really am or really have. I don’t know how to find you, whether you be blind or sighted, trapped in your burnt down estate or in some other woman’s gentle care. I think this is what bothers me. I don’t know your fate and for a while I had bound mine up in yours and your failure and flight has taken some fragment of what I should be with it. Possibly.
To know one thing for certain would be an extraordinary lullaby.
Instead, in lieu of that, I daydream you miss me. I daydream you were always aware of my shadow, knew it for what it was, and you stole the bad fate we had together away from me, kept all the sorrow for yourself and saved me from a long and terrible fall from which I could not get up.
In such a light, it is hard not to forgive you most things, even perhaps, the leaving itself. In such a light, you are a hero and I the faithful scribe, chronicling your saga. In such a light, you might be as near to me as pen to paper. The darkness in you only spattered ink.
