It is a Tuesday and I feel like Monday was lost, left somewhere in America's biggest mall and taken by someone who wanted it more. It is strange that we can want things that we do not love, with such ferocity as to rival the strength of any other desires. We don't give a damn about things but we will fight for them. Maybe that's a terrible thing. Somehow I am certain that it is a good thing - somehow I know that within that kernel of knowledge is a truth about humanity that I would rather choke on than laugh to.
When I sat in that hospital corridor and looked up at the lights I left like a camera was watching the weight of my throat as I breathed in and out, and I thought about that crippling grasp of old age which curls slowly around your neck. We know it is there - it sometimes touches us on our veins, where we can count our pulse in fear. Yet it does not scare us - there is a gentleman's agreement between ourselves and our age, in that we may ignore it until our bodies remember the weight of gravity. When we are children we fear gravity and cry, we cry arrogant until rooms are full with the sound. When we are old we remain silent. We have lost a game that mattered to us, and only too late have we realized that it was never a game at all, it was a tease, tantalus with grapes above his head on prescient branches.
This girl is seventeen and she is terrified and when I held her hand I remembered being terrified and seventeen and part of me was in love with here, there, where white lights played cheerful pantomime on her cheeks.
Later in the night I found myself drunk, sitting in a bar and laughing, because I could. I laughed and the sounds fell out over my feet, crawling towards the windows and railing and searching for escalators to the stars. I let them go and drank another shot. There was a full moon somewhere but I didn't feel like looking for it that night. I still don't.
-Rich
somewhere in this shaved undying boneyard
When I sat in that hospital corridor and looked up at the lights I left like a camera was watching the weight of my throat as I breathed in and out, and I thought about that crippling grasp of old age which curls slowly around your neck. We know it is there - it sometimes touches us on our veins, where we can count our pulse in fear. Yet it does not scare us - there is a gentleman's agreement between ourselves and our age, in that we may ignore it until our bodies remember the weight of gravity. When we are children we fear gravity and cry, we cry arrogant until rooms are full with the sound. When we are old we remain silent. We have lost a game that mattered to us, and only too late have we realized that it was never a game at all, it was a tease, tantalus with grapes above his head on prescient branches.
This girl is seventeen and she is terrified and when I held her hand I remembered being terrified and seventeen and part of me was in love with here, there, where white lights played cheerful pantomime on her cheeks.
Later in the night I found myself drunk, sitting in a bar and laughing, because I could. I laughed and the sounds fell out over my feet, crawling towards the windows and railing and searching for escalators to the stars. I let them go and drank another shot. There was a full moon somewhere but I didn't feel like looking for it that night. I still don't.
-Rich
somewhere in this shaved undying boneyard
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