Fat and Thin and Happy and Sad Couples

a reflection via email:

Some nights- he'd just sit there. the door way past ajar to the bathroom. His boxers not quite down, but resting as a cotton and nylon DMZ between his laptop and his bare, dry skin. And he'd write. He'd write about how he was writing, or more often, he'd write about how his words were meant to convince a girl to love him. or in the very least let him love her. He'd swear he meant it- and he'd believe it too. He believed it soo much, he'd sit naked in his bathroom with the door wide open, and tell the first person who came into view. These thoughts were parentheses of nights he could sleep, and the mornings he could never seem to wake up in time to make use of.


His time is not his own anymore. His time is spent on someone else. It belongs to her, she owns it and controls him in a way neither of them are aware of. There are things he has given up and given up on and he understands this only in the way that writing and thinking and staying awake at night is all he can do.

And there will be a realization, but he is not there yet. The form in which it comes is still unknown, but it is on its way. It's haunting him, and sometimes this feeling gets mistaken for love and other times it is actually love that he is feeling. Sometimes they are the same, sometimes they are dialectically opposed sometimes he has a parallax view of his situation as he looks onward from the bathroom mirror.

"If the obsession with the word 'onward' has become universal nowadays, isn't it largely because death now speaks to us at such close range?"

Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

She is in his thoughts, in his heart, and on his page. It is all very real and it is at the same time unreal, beyond, more than reality. Perception is a wondrous thing.

When he gave up smoking he told her he could give it up any time. And he believed it and she believed in him---a cyclone of intent, effect and possibility that when presented linear-ly confuses in much the same way as the chicken or the egg conundrum.

But the narrator looked up from his page and was unsure how to continue. What could he say that is hopeful and promising? What are the words for the situation that spark belief? How to interpret longings as the brighter path?

When the narrator looked back down at the page, his face full with determination, his fingers scissoring the keyboard with surgeon-like precision and the words appearing on the page, maybe not in the way they appeared in his head were messy at best, like the first time a apprentice chef makes a souffle. Some things are just delicate.

Use it. He typed.

Use it all, every modern feeling. Fight off the bleakness. But don't for a second think that its sacred.

Let Bukowski kill yr Kerouac., because if she is worth loving she is worth fighting for...