truthfront

Category: love

  • Muck

    I stretched my hand down to the milky puddle of muck and felt inside. I was expecting to feel bones, soaked and broken shards of human life. There was nothing.

    The sun stung my bare back and the back of my neck and birds harmonized on some nearby perch. I could imagine them gliding through the sky, endless blue tapestry of summer, chasing each other in pursuit of love or sustenance or just because they were programmed to. I felt around in the white water, my arm disappearing at the wrist, then the elbow. There were things floating on the surface, brown and black fragments of revolving life blown from the margins of the city. I watched the fragments rise up from the murky depth and then roll over, dropping down out of sight again. My hand was shaped into a claw down there somewhere in the unknown.

    “What is that?”

    I turned my head up toward the sun and saw the kid. He had bright blonde hair and his face was caked with dirt. He stood before me squinting from the white puddle to me, then back to the puddle again. He sucked on the pinkie finger of his right hand.

    “Huh? What is that?” he said.

    “What is what.”

    “The puddle.”

    “It’s a puddle, kid.”

    “Why is it white?”

    “Get out of here,” I said, and turned back to the white muck. I sloshed my hand around inside and the puddle began to foam about the edges. Little white bubbles, frozen pockets of air and dirt, a ready-made mixture of cellular utopia. There were no bones, no death, no proof of life. The water did not hold my reflection. I looked back and saw that the kid was still there.

    “This puddle,” I told him. “There’s nothing in it.”

    I pulled my arm out and stuck the other arm in.

    “Go get a stick,” I said. The kid ran off to find a stick. I saw him run to the far end of the alley to a small green hill with two trees standing stark against the deep cyanic sky. I turned back to the puddle and immersed both arms down into it. There was nothing.

    “Here,” the kid said, handing me a small stick.

    “Bigger. I need a bigger stick. Longest stick you can find.”

    “This is the longest stick I could find.”

    “Find a longer one,” I said. “There’s got to be a longer one.”

    The kid ran off again. The sun beat down on my back and car tires made ripping sounds on the asphalt on the other side of the alley, in another world and time. A short cool breeze whipped between the buildings and chilled my skin just as the kid returned. He brought me what looked like half of a tree.

    “Where the hell did you get that?”

    “It was in the dumpster.”

    “Give it to me.”

    I extracted my arms from the milky murk and took the giant stick and looked at it, made sure it was sturdy. It must have been eight feet long. I told the kid to step back and then I began to dip the stick into the water, inches at a time, watching it vanish slowly into the white, one then two feet, a void unlike anything else, three feet submerged, a bottomless alien well of whiteness placed here not by man, four feet and still disappearing, and I heard the kid inhale sharply, dumbstruck with awe and curiosity and wonder, and then the stick was almost gone, almost swallowed to my hands, lost down in that white water muck, the consumer of souls and dreams and life and death alike.

    “What is that thing, man?” the kid said. “How deep does it go?”

    I dropped the stick all the way into the water and stood back, waiting for it to come flying back out. The alley and the surrounding streets were silent.

    “Should I go get the cops?”

    I took a look at the kid and then down to the end of the alley. A woman held a plastic grocery bag and stood behind her dog as it crapped against one of the buildings. I looked up to the haunting blue endlessness and heard a siren screeching a few blocks away like a baby coming into the world. I told the kid yeah, go get the cops.

    I watched him run down the alley and hurdle the pile of dog shit and turn the corner and then I took off my sandals and placed them neatly next to me. I put one foot down into the warm white mystery and pulled it out. Then I looked around me and dove into the puddle head first, like a reawakening into a deep cathartic dream where no color exists but to free the mind of fear.

  • a memory in algorithm

    Everywhere I look is where I see him.

    Downtown city streets awash in morning glow, throng of heads bobbing with the tide of rote obligation. Lives wholly separate but flowing together, a predesigned uniform cause. Thousands of personal histories carrying their preternatural weight, their stories. These are intersecting bloodlines, divergent strains of DNA coiled in distinct splendor, yet each of them anonymous and irrelevant when condensed by the crowd. Personal struggles no longer matter. Children and time and detailed subplots are trampled and forgotten underfoot. Fifteen paces up ahead a man turns his head in profile and the cold sunlight splashes his face, my father’s face, a snapshot frozen in memory long after the man regains his centeredness, facing forward.

    I quicken my pace, my eyes stuck on the back of his head. The image remains branded into my mind and my father resurfaces, not just his image or his face the way I remember it but his chided spirit, what it meant to be my father in this world, his burden of strain and deep disconnected habit. In a span of seconds I’m thinking of how my father’s legacy is imbedded in my body and mind. I’m thinking of my commitment to him, of our brief interaction on this planet and its stranglehold on everything I touch. It was just a stranger in a blinking moment of illusion but it was also my father, a careful revelation into my origins, a walking memory of a man that has become so much more than flesh and blood.

    The crowd seems to thicken, to intensify in density, a calculated frustration of my pursuit. I move faster, sweating now in the morning frost, hoping he’ll turn again. Next time I’ll get a better look, I’ll prove to myself that it is just a stranger and not my dead father. It couldn’t possibly be him, the man I hated and loved, the man upon whom my own genetic habits and tendencies were patterned. I walk faster still, his steps matching mine. He moves at a rate of imminent escape.

    An old man stands against a giant gray building and plays songs on his battered guitar, the case open and virginal in front of him. His face is scrunched into the drawl of a song, a slow expression compressed by years of struggle. He looks nothing like my father. His song is beautiful, a steady weaving lament of molten silk, and in this brief encounter I’m saddened by the way it gets lost in the bawl of activity. The streets throb with the morning crowd, an aura written in plumes of people’s steam, the vehicle exhaust. Paper coffee cups and flickering traffic lights and cellular phones. The history of the city is written in the rebirth of the morning, in the success and toil and steel and glass and concrete of yesterday, the forgetfulness, the failed dreams scrawled in stained sidewalk residue. I look up and the likeness of my father has gone, merged into the confluence of everyone and everything.

  • Broken mirror

    And so they walked into the library, towering cathedral of light. Devotees in tandem surrounded on all sides by mankind’s greatest gifts to the universe. Dyed cloth and leather-bound truths stacked in neat proportion, titles and subtitles stamped and translated upon the spines of those immortal wardens of knowledge. The books filled the shelves and climbed to a rectangle skylight high above.

    “There was a time when our lives connected, you and me,” he said. “A symbol, a thread. Symbol of a thread. Two people mirroring each other, hundreds of miles apart. Shadowed beings in complicit multi-dimensional transit.”

    “It wasn’t like that, really.”

    “My actions as demands upon your actions. You, urging me onward, my movements and decisions like subconscious pullings from another realm. A voice in the night. It was like having a twin, a shared consciousness, our destinies converging at a precise gridline somewhere in the margins.”

    “I never felt that,” she said.

    They walked slowly past the As, their eyes darting upward into the soft light, registering those sacred forgotten names, a recollection of something intimate experienced long ago, some message renewed, a respect paid in rapid fire as another name crossed their periphery. Achebe, Allende, Andrzejewski, Augustine.

    “One and two, two and one,” he said. “One and the same. The same. An error in code, the single miscalculation of the universe. Me reincarnated as you but living in the same fluid scale of time, sharing the era. Past and future in mystical collision. Two autonomous minds subjected to the frailty of oneness.”

    “What does that even mean?”

    “But then love confronted us, showed us who we were. It was like a mirror set before our eyes, yours and mine, in our different places. Love convinced us we were two separate souls pointing in opposite directions. It broke our bond, broke us down, built us into distinct forces. Love is the reason we are alone.”

    “Who are you?” she said.

    The simple curve of the C, with serifs and without. Camus, Cervantes, Chekhov. The slender shape of primitive weaponry mutated and frozen into meaning by the men and women who have wielded the letters most deftly. Coetzee, Conrad, Cummings. To learn about a place and a people, they must be experienced directly, firsthand. Our next best option is to absorb their literature.

    “Disclosure has stricken us with solitude. We no longer share the same course of thought, driven into our shared plane of existence. I’m only half alive because the other part of me died when I met you. Before, you guided me. Now you aren’t even there. The voice is gone. I hear only my own voice,” he said.

    They walked past the Es, the Fs. They didn’t see each other, half-listening, vision stretched to the limits of stimulation. The books contain, among other things, concentrated thought, the stories of generations and caste struggle, individuality at its strongest, its most raw and vulnerable. The beauty of the mundane, the horror and magnitude of the sublime. Comedy and tragedy, Faulkner, France, Frost. The most important minds of their culture, the disdained, the persecuted, the exalted, the romanticized and peculiarly burdened.

    “I used to lie in bed at night and listen to my heartbeat, pretend it was footsteps,” she said. “The rhythm of my heart at rest was the pulse of a faceless man walking around the world. Black dress shoes shined to a luminous knife’s edge. He was walking around the world and when he finally got to his destination, I would die.”

    “What was his destination?”

    “It was me. He was walking to me. He still is. He’s somewhere on this planet, walking. And when he finally gets to me I’ll see his face, eyes dark and replete with revelation, calm assurance from pale nomadic death, and I’ll know that I was always right to trust my veins.”

    “We are a species that fears death more than anything,” he said. “We have created astounding myths to subvert death, to appease our fear. Death has no legs. It has no concept of time. When we die there is no big reveal, no fabricated deus ex machina. It cannot fool us. Death is a positive experience, it strips away all the negatives. It is the truest of truths, because, can you possibly think of anything more real?”

    Their voices bounced off the stacks around them and returned mostly the same but aged, withered at the edges, wiser and hardened. Their voices carried facsimiles of the stamped names on the shelves, Joyce, Kobayashi, Lawrence, the titles unfurling as they strolled, symbolic and fragmented histories, Ulysses, Tabishui, The Rainbow, horizontal and vertical, a tapestry of letters and colors emblazoned everlasting. Language as pure force. The skylight darkened high above, restless clouds stalking about. The library fell into shadow.

    “All these books,” she said, breaking the spell, uttering the heretofore unmentioned, slightly desecrating, or at least, de-mystifying the moment. “The names, the stories. Many of these books were written at such heavy consequence. People died for these words, these billion, trillion words.”

    “No,” he said. “They died for the ideas the words represent. These are history’s truest martyrs. Timeless spiritual reminders of ourselves in retrospect. We have a duty to them to uphold our own reflections, our own struggles, and relate them to progeny. We must do this not only in honor of their sacrifice but also to satisfy our own artistic impetus. Nothing is more valuable to a culture than its art. Art is the fight of the people, the revolving paradigm, the mirror of culture, idealizing human life in its confrontation with the divine.”

    Rushdie, Sartre, Stendal. Tolstoy. Twain, Voltaire, Whitman.

    They walked the entire perimeter and then turned to face the center of the room. Drowned in silent awe, an ardor for mankind and its potential, proud sentiments for the simplest of objects in concealment of the most complex ideas. In this way, literature is like humanity itself. They felt the books looking directly back at them.

    “We are still connected, you and me,” she said. “But instead of a shared drive, we strive to forge our own paths. This is the way it is supposed to be, the way it was always supposed to be. A human being is an inherently independent creature. The other people of his culture may serve a particular purpose, but a man or a woman must fundamentally feed his or her own will. This is the most basic necessity. All these books, this room full of books. It’s like a vault enshrining the battle cry of the individual.”

    “Love is the reason we are alone,” he said again, and they turned to leave.

  • Untitled

    When the rain had left she cast her eyes down to a puddle at her feet, her own shimmery reflection. Blue and gray evening sky, air sharpened to cool guillotine clarity. She felt the weight of the world slip away from her as the sky opened up, clouds painted pink and orange with god’s metaphysical exhaust. She watched herself in the water, disfigured by the truth of the moment, and she realized a particular energy flowing up through her, those frozen moments of pure identity, what it means to be alive when the sun sets after a storm and the birds come out to confront their melodious reckoning.

    The cars sat stationary behind her, a line of idling cars stretched back to the curve in the road, waiting for her. She heard them humming in her head and looked up, patience in uniform and an acknowledgment of something greater than themselves, their pocketed moments of scrutiny. Everything made sense. Time collapsed around her, the mirrored figure, the stationary procession of cars, their spellbound drivers, the sky, Earth, the rhythmic pulse of universal energy meeting at the rendezvous of flawed humanity. She took a final glance into the puddle and walked away, watching the drivers steel their machines onward, throbbing vein of continuation.

  • At end of day

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    She looks out the great high rise window to the sprawling city, her hand pressed to the cold glass, staring past miles and miles of steam and concrete melded with steel and all the aromas and emotions and struggles therein. We make believe this matters, she thinks. This life. We do research studies and try to find patterns and gaps in the patterns although we know well enough what shapes our lives. We spend life looking for love and more often than not we don’t find it in pure form and so we ridicule ourselves, we are bred to believe that love rather than its pursuit is our ultimate goal.

    The world is gray this evening in the fading light and she removes her hand from the window. She thinks back to what life was like as a child in the streets of New York and she can’t remember. She leans forward, her forehead on the glass and her eyes cast fifty-eight stories straight down to the rote madness of rush hour and she retreats again to the idea of love, ironic notions, thinking that when we find ourselves paranormally blessed with that rare presence of anonymous affection and deep inward truth we cringe inwardly because love is never anything like we thought it would be and it ultimately uncovers things about us we’d rather have kept concealed. It is a matter of definition, entirely subjective, but the deadly force of love is the same anywhere and everywhere in the human psyche, complete in its distinction and without prejudice. Love and its intangibles command certain things from us in order to survive in their wake. It is a weakness of youth, she thinks, that we fail to recognize the overall pervading premise of love as learning. Love and life are about teaching ourselves how to channel regret and loss into motivating themes. This is what dominates our world, it tells us more about our humanity than anything else.

    She moves away from the window and looks at the clutter of paper on her desk. She flicks off the desk lamp, washing the room in shadow. The city seems to wrap its arms around her, each flickering light distinct and filled with wonder. She turns and grabs her jacket before leaving the office.

  • Fountainhead of love

    I lie wide awake and rapt by the art form, dizzied by repose. Your body smooth and unzipped wide open by my roving finger, our intimate moments shared without the burden of language, pasts suspended behind us and we don’t dare honor them. It’s a sacrilege to speak, to spoil the sanctity of the tracing motion. Our attention lives hushed in unison somewhere in ridged fingertips, in sullied navels empty but filled with shared moments of raw disregard. Everything we don’t know doesn’t matter, it gets thrust into void. Truth lies in sensory input, in the gentle whisper of the candle at bedside, in the oil on your glowing skin, in the slow rise and fall of your chest. I remember you from a dream.

    It seems I need you to prove my own existence, untangled from you to the fluttering light of the flame, I feel exposed to tragedy, tires peeling past on the concrete outside the window, life exists out there and it is cold, you turn your head and your eyes are easy, reassuring, the stars are aligned, I’m hungry again, to keep this moment packed away, wrapped in little plastic bubbles made of air, slow motion of the will in time performing tricks in my mind, nothing else matters.

    I have orange hair and yet I live for you, in this moment I live for you. Perhaps in my next life I’ll be less poetic, more practical, perhaps I’d rather die slowly, alarmingly, and no one will remember me, I see myself in the reflection of your nakedness, I love what I see.