cupid grabs the pistol
what is this fucking torrent that has taxis zipping past, drenching me with muddy, streaming refuse, has my new stockings sopping, hanging loosely, wetly off my calves, has me leaping pond-sized puddles in my skirt, my face molten, my hair dripping early am shampoo scent frigidly down my coat, shirt, back, has me myopically hydroplaning, sailing long beyond my intended destination down manchester, has me miserable and skygrey, wallowing in wet, unfriendly chill, not the way today should be? there was a time during which i relished the weather as much as she. not today, not tomorrow, not now that i am too busy to be delayed by heavenly droplets, too preoccupied to notice their glinting gametish swim across my window, too focused on the next stop to appreciate their silvery journey.
his words are keen and piercing, captivating my sentiment exactly as he begins the chapter about the sudden, unexplained desertion, the motivations his shame will never permit him to express to himself, much less to her. he writes: ....initiated a chain reaction of spoken and unspoken questions at breakfast tables across the city, and in bedrooms, and in other cities too: are we still good? okay, how good? are there things you're not telling me? am i going to wake up one day and you'll say something that makes me realize i've been sharing my bed with a stranger? how will tomorrow rewrite yesterday, how will next week unmake the past five, ten, fifteen years? are you bored? is it my fault? are you weaker than i thought? is it him? is it her? is it the sex? the children? do you want to fix it? is there anything to fix do you love me? do you still love me? do i still, oh jesus jesus, love you?
the same domino-track phantom that envelopes my mind, paralyzing me, encasing me in its nasty box of singular thought. all his perceptive words transfix me, send me reeling, smiling, connecting page to page to page until i'm utterly lost and don't notice we've passed my stop long ago, have me backtracking many blocks to get to where i should have realized we were. my nose in his book, i'm caught up in his thoughts, the reflective pool of my own, and i identify the scattered nature of his prose and, being similarly directionally disposed, easily connect the sparsely sprinkled dots that others routinely complain leaves them wondering how the fuck they got to q from c with no transition in between. i love it. he's add enough for me without mimicking her flitflitflit that zaps my synapses with its incomprehensible leaps. he's naturally streamofconsciousness, while hers is amphetamine-induced, phony and far too fast for me.
i am supposed to profess my love today more than others but mine doesn't bow to conventional reigning. i awoke this dank morning to his murmurs to his dreamy, gauzy her and hurt because i didn't know her, me, whoever. erect, he responded not to my touch but to the dreamy images parading through his head. and i stewed greenly over some fleeting nocturnal lust.
the reason so many women experience such distress over their men in the presence of other, bustier, younger, whatever sprites is that they roll over and see this sort of thing, this permeation of every waking, sleeping, middling moment with sex. and they assume the oozing encompassing has no bounds. if rockhard without actual stimulation, how must he be with her or her or her or her there? how must he want them all?
generally, men don't see their ladies the same. they wake up, hear her and masturbate, aroused when she'd be petrified.
i read his words ravenously and wonder if he reads them the same. he introduced me, i sent him this very book, knowing he'd devour it similarly, before i'd even glimpsed the words within. i'm eternally indebted for his lent gift of the first work and, for all the distance i wedged between us, for all i cut him off from me, it echoes the comfort i once found in him, when no one else would have me, when no one else understood me. he did. and then his previously shrouded nine inches fucked it up. fucked me up.
and for the better. his powdery pasttimes don't venn with mine. and, although we shared linus, it was probably the extent of our joint parental inklings.
but i lost a good friend who would have known why i smiled.
i'll have to convert him to the fury, the passion of his words. solly with his knife poised symbolizes much that's cynical in me. solly seduced slowly by america then realizing, knee-deep, that he despises everything about her, everything she makes him, solly finding love, finding himself unable to keep it, to savor it just for what it is lives somewhere inside me.
he calls, he writes, his voice, words penetrate me. i let him affect me so. once, i thought where i am would be a cage, i felt liberated, i housed casual interests that never really sunk or settled, once i confused my confusion with freedom, confused my pitiful attempt at connection with invigoration, confused loneliness with desire. he penetrated me. i'm stuck, swooning but so frequently unbound into the vacuum of the universe, grasping for a way back to him, for the umbilicus i've planted, sprouted, nurtured between us, the same of which he writes, chastising was nobody in all this bustling endeavor and materiaql plenitude engaged, any longer, on the deep quarry-work of the mind and heart? if nothing else, since nearly two years past the initial grazing of our souls and pelvic bones, he has kept me furiously focused on the dig.
