For Now

Short story...

I often have nothing to say to anyone; I live alone. My thoughts have nowhere to go but inward. I do not think in words; the notion of an internal monologue is entirely alien to me. The moments when I do allow the quick translation of the bottomless spontaneity of mind I become afraid, quite afraid that my thoughts have become too real, that somehow silently speaking them solidified them. I often find it difficult to distinguish what it is I thought and what I mistranslated; once I’ve decided to officially think, that is, translate my thinking it an easily digestible lexicon, can I go back, unravel the affect, or has it nuzzled too deeply into my self? This congealed thought, with its fleeting tangibility, can never be identical to the original, it operates like an external puppeteer; there is someone else here… there must always be someone else here. I can never be truly alone and I can never be anything but alone. This may be why people across cultures and languages, believe in some variation of angels and demons: we are always beside ourselves, there is always someone else lingering, someone else that cannot exist, yet somehow does. 

When my desires get the best of me, and I, somewhat pitifully, affecting a demure tinged with disenchantment, allow a man into my bed, I am still alone, more so than before. I can never decide whether to keep the lights on or off, but this thought especially, I am afraid to think too intensely, for I may spontaneously translate it into something translatable, into a comfortable dilemma; this dilemma is anything but comfortable, for me, it is earth-shattering. Which option is less pornographic and more erotic? All this thinking, all these vulgar words are pornography in its purest form, substance spelled out, laid entirely bare. If they cannot see me am I nothing but a panting, moist warmth? Does the lack of sight bring attention to each individual piece? Like a blind newborn, could you possibly know that my cold flaccid arm connects to my warm fleshy center? Or maybe, only when you cannot see, I become whole, I become desire rather than an object of desire; when you cannot see you cannot help but wonder, you wonder and imagine until you no longer think of me. Maybe that is love. Maybe having sex with the lights off is reserved for those deeply in love. I imagine being told by my imaginary lover… please I cannot live without you…I must have you, but I must not see you; I venture into the realm of the unsayable, the untranslatable, and my eyes….my eyes are nothing more but the continuation of language, of this evil compulsion for pure transcription. My eyes see colors, shapes, depth, but the color surrounding you cannot be perceived, you’re surrounded by glorious colored noise too far, or too close, for any eyes or ears to detect, but I feel it — yes, I feel it. 

I am trying to de-sanctify my already de-sanctified body. Is there anything I can do to regain purity? I am not debauched through my encounters — there haven’t been nearly enough — but through my dissembling; one day I realized my arms could be ripped off and I would still live, my name wouldn’t change, I would still be me, and my world shattered. I must not think. My constant thinking, this constant babble soils and contaminates everything it sees, hears, smells, thinks. Yes, It, not I -- I cannot claim this machinery of thought any longer, it is not me, it cannot be me. I need a lover who cannot live without me, so much so that he’ll die upon looking at me. Every day I live through mini, consecutive catastrophes. I wish I could be a happier person, but each moment, I’m wet with the amniotic fluid of the past and wet with arousal by the impending future… I can’t be if I have only been and only become, and I trudge and trudge through the thick of the present, with each labored gesture my diabolic exhaustion immediately requires yet another heavy movement to free up the strained limb. 

But every day I talk, wholly and audibly, to my one single rose sitting in a thin, unassuming vase and a recently fallen ladybug perched morbidly on the windowsill. They, it, put no pressure on me to become, when I’m away, even just in the other room, I might as well not, or have never, existed to them. When I come back, they greet me just the same, by being just as they were; I expect nothing of them and they expect nothing of me. 

I realize this rose, unable to comprehend the passing of time and thus existing entirely outside of its scope, in this very instant, thinks I’ve been standing over her forever, and I weep; my thick tears patter down her petals, her inanimate limbs. If her petals are her limbs then her seductive center, whorish and delicate, must also be her neck. Her vagina and her neck are one… how fortunate she is… if I could be fucked and amorously caressed in the same spot maybe I wouldn’t have to agonize over whether sex in the dark is reserved for lovers or whores. The flower never sees her original lover; a bee carries the seed and the burden of sexual anonymity. I envy the divinity of her no-contact intercourse. Her atemporality allows her to do away with the warm body I need to ground myself, the body I need to remind myself that although matter perennially slips through my fingers chasing its own demise, this body, remains in this instant forever.  

And this ladybug, as dead as any living thing can be, possesses no odor. Or rather, she possesses an imperceptible smell like my diminutive, synchronous catastrophes; I cannot entirely feel my world crumbling, but I somehow know that it does; I cannot smell death although I am certain that this ladybug is dead. She hallowed out so sweetly, refusing to bloat or leak or rot or putrefy. She is conscious just like me, but living outside of time just like the flower, experiencing life unfragmented as a never beginning and never-ending series of now. 

I want to love in this way and I feel so awfully ashamed that I cannot. I wish I could explain to them, in the way of man, with structured profanity, a vulgarity so sinister that it draws attention to its stringent drawing and breaking of rules — by speaking. I wish I could explain that human love defines itself against the despondency and ecstasy of constant becoming. My enlarged, buyout breasts bring forth ancestral aquatic memories; water is time and time is water and I carry the weight of history in my phantom milk-filled breasts. 

I even dare whisper, as low as my vocal cords are capable, secrets I cannot access. I whisper, ever so softly, undetectable to the human ear, “I want a baby…I want a baby…” I am afraid to utter this too loudly out of fear that I may hear. I want a baby. You’ve been with me forever… my unknown, unborn, undead baby….I was born with your egg already inside of me. 

I want a baby. I want a love that is truly pure; I don’t want a love that merely displaces all my excess primordial energy…. my baby would be a part of me that I cannot feel. In the early years of infancy, my baby is me, but I am not my baby. I wrap this ephemeral umbilical cord of warm milk and utter helplessness around my neck and tighten until just enough oxygen painfully percolates into my lungs. You do not love me yet, my dear sweet infant child, you think that I am you. I eject a piece of myself into the realm of unconsciousness and I die a small death. You are a corpse bursting with the entire universe, relentlessly taking, leaching my soul, and I love you, I love you; I will keep dying for you over and over again. 

I’m being drawn and quartered by these ever-compounding intervals…. and you, my little sweet flower, my rose, your consciousness is spread across time and space, the agony of existence cannot reach you as easily. I sit here, with a dull pain in my pelvis melting into the background as my body pushes out its entrails, punishing me for what could have been — punishing me for pushing back the imminent moment, for rewriting the future. My blood gently patters into my underwear, just as the rain gently patters onto your petals and down by your veiny roots, and just as my tears patter down into my open, rose-thorned lacerated hands.  

If a small child or a devastated woman walks by and absentmindedly plucks your plush and feathery arm, you continue. Your petals are thrown onto a lover’s bed or back into the wet dirt of the flower bed full of your ancestors and predecessors and bearers of fractions of your soul, and you continue. Asymmetry does not look bad on you as it does on me and that is how I know you must be closer to the ultimate thing. I, being such a broken, forsaken creature, one missing piece draws attention to my ugliness, but forgotten fragments and asymmetry draw attention to your perfectly disordered harmony. Nobody gazes lovingly into one eye and an empty socket; it is grotesque, unlovable.  

But I, when I am hurt, the pain is so concentrated, it sears through my body with such a sweet intensity, and the physical anguish bleeds over so easily onto my soul…my soul, so exposed to the elements, yet thoroughly concealed and impalpable… my soul like your obscured roots, feverishly soak up all the elements. God is me and you and all that exists but I forgot my name and how to die. He feigns total ignorance of his creations in order to love them, but I invented words and now this nothingness is profoundly hellish rather than divine and I wish I understood I must first be abandoned to feel our closeness. 

I glance at my sleeping cat. She is neither outside time nor under constant constraint and it’s why she almost can love. She merely trusts me and enjoys my companionship, incapable of devastation or bliss. To her, I’m no different than this rose, a pleasing companion, outside of time, unaware of the sights and smells only a cat can be attuned to. Maybe if I slaughter her amongst the loving gaze of my rose and my dead ladybug, I can finally love her and she can finally love me. 

I’m bleeding and bleeding with each contraction bringing forth a grotesque surging, and I’m so sorry I didn’t have a baby; I really truly wanted one, but there was no one to give me one. I’m ceaselessly punished for experiencing the future in succession to the past, for my inability to feel the present devoid of its terrifying immanence; when I remove the immanent moment, I am punished yet again. I cannot know peace until… until what?

And I wonder, if love is an ontological reality, as utterable as the very word, and not something fantastical and fabricated, then how do those far-away life forms love? I know the divine thing loves in ways I cannot understand because it does not have a body or a nervous system or a brain or a tongue; and when the love is mistranslated and I feel a great rattling and trembling of the soul and the body that I inhabit denotes this as terror and pain, I cry evil. Maybe on another planet with different stars and planets and suns and moons where time and gravity mutate incomprehensibly, love looks just like this: sitting perfectly still, unable to speak, unable to communicate in any tangible way. Maybe there would be no gravity to aggravate this heaviness in my chest, or by comparison, make the enrapturing lightness of joy feel so spectacular. If my dear sweet sun was cooler and less scintillating, maybe love wouldn’t be so frenzied; my passion ignites through the exorbitant excess of my sun. Oh my sun, your beams penetrate through me with such a force I cannot tolerate… I shake and tremble, pushing forth this limpid extraction of archaic reproductive light, this terrible burden, onto someone else; I think that is love. I love you. I’m creating time for you. I’m giving you beams of thousand-year-old light. 

I hate that the word love even exists. The phrase I love you often sickens me because I don’t know what it means. Maybe I know what it means until the moment it is uttered, or, I only know what it means when it is uttered. The I is always suspended from the you by that evil little word. The words do not exist on their own but have become part of an enigmatic phrase compounding in an impossible fashion. In the universe of the phrase I love you, 1+1+1 does not equal 3. 1+1+1 equals 27.

I feel a warm stickiness. Did I finally do it? Did I reach it… the beyond? Did the previous moment never occur because it already happened at the beginning of time and the atoms and God grew weary and wished to skip ahead? My cat is dead; her blood is dripping everywhere. And this horrible sadness…this wretched loss collapses the past into the never-ending future and I am horribly chained to Earth by this gravitational melancholy. I am so sad. I did something gravely evil, or did I? My blood thickens, struggling to make it around my bony joints and I conceive of my upper and lower arms and legs as separate as I tap into my joyous primal reserves, imagining painfully sprouting excess arms and legs as I crawl and writhe on the ground. 

A vibrating, resonating blue and white surround me and my substratum of being bleeds through my skin and out through my eyes, and I cannot decipher if I am gazing so penetratingly into the mirror that I’m falling out the other side or if I’m standing in a pile of mirror shards that sadistically lacerate deeply into the veins of my feet. My baby… my baby… I say…I sob… I choke on the words that bear too much meaning once spoken. I take my now-dead cat’s blood, my own putrid blood, and the ladybug and I spread the rose’s soft pillowy legs and gently finger the hollow bug down into her center. I weep over her, watering her, fertilizing her. I gave you a baby…do you love me…do you love me… I say aloud to no one.