Five Fifty Four

This is what I am aware of, the subtlety and brazenness of my talks with myself, which are constant, threads hanging from ornaments dressed in linen shrouds like paintings, murals spreading from one wall to the next –as I cannot sleep, and neither want to.

And now it’s your turn to appear. It’s hard, coiling around itself, this thought that is you, everything that this new you might mean –hair, lips, touch, smell, eyes, words, silence- all this is you. I could describe you very effectively, with elaborate adjectives, beautifully constructed sentences that would conjure your image completely, realistically –as an autumn dream between rainfall, as one of those things that began with everything and left without speaking- but I won’t. Perhaps it would be too painful to make you into something I wish you were, to dress you and envelop you with words and meanings that are definitively one-sided, biased loves, or to take you away from me and put you inside this page which is not even a page. And perhaps it isn’t so; perhaps the only thing I could remember about you would be all the things that related to me, that changed me, that made me feel something new. I don’t know why I’m writing this; some sentimentality, some unadorned, pedestrian, bourgeois melancholy taking over and leaving me obscure, hurt, frightened, immature, perhaps. Perhaps in these short spaces of time we stand still, fixed within everything, like landscapes. I could carry on saying perhaps, perhaps, perhaps; I could carry on- I would be able to still have dreams and to forget them.
And yet it is not the sun slowly rising; it’s not the light making shadows, marking every difference, every crevice, every brick, every face; it’s not the night that passed by quickly and happened insubstantially; it’s not my life that happens; it’s not my life that I cannot see. It’s the vagueness of every present moment, the fog which keeps everything at a distance but so severely close, where you can walk without ever knowing what you might fall into, where anything is anything, and the possibilities are endless, and vision is only half-real, half-certain, half-believed. I could keep you locked inside these mists for a long time, and bring you water from springs so full of a life that has only half-existed, without ever realising your absence. But it is now here. It clings on my face like the humid moistness of a faithless summer, this invisibility, which everyone knows and fears more than anything, because it can only be imagined and felt.

And in your absence, all things happen at once, simultaneously, mercilessly real. And in your absence, says my mind, in your absence I have hidden myself –and what is left of you, of the body of you, is a packet of Spanish cigarette papers, a thing so mundane and insubstantial that it now lives as fully and naturally as a tree. Moments have been erased from my memory deliberately, because they come back so forcefully it makes my head spin –memories like cobwebs, silken, loosely connected, strong, shining in this dawn-light like ripples in gurgling Mediterranean streams.
This dawn I might regret you.