I want there to be a place for all of them, for the mes that are loved in countless contexts, disparate only in the superficial sense. Can I tell my family that I’ve done all these drugs and read all these books and suffered all these heady mistakes? My guess is yes. Which of you isn’t family, anyhow?
“See, I only say things to people so that they can have been said. Not so much for the sense-making that comes after. I’m trying to express a feeling, a thought process, in real time. To catch it as it goes by and describe it in agonizing detail. I hope this doesn’t bore you. I’m trying to stay extra-present, in a sense, so if you’re bored then it means I’m doing something wrong. If we’re going to call this anything at all, let’s at least call it fun.”
I know people all over the place, right? And I have this notion that even as I sit here they are going along on their merry way, reasonably locatable in space and time. But I can’t really be sure. All I can go on is the fact that I’m thinking about them, and insofar as my thinking is a physical process, one as utterly a part of the universe as my body, or your body, or the particle-rich air between us, then the things I’m thinking about are indeed made manifest. They are locatable in space in time, in the very same space and time as me. There’s not much difference between seeing you in what we commonly call reality and seeing you in what we commonly call dreams. Which is to say there’s plenty different, but that’s not the story I’m selling. I like thinking that we’re fundamentally in agreement at all times, us common manifestations of the Universe. And if you’re willing to entertain an argument one way or the other, then we can at least agree that we’re having an argument.
I guess what I’m saying is if I’m here, and you’re here, and here’s here, then we’re all here together. It’s one big convoluted team effort.
In a real technical sense, I’m sitting here at Tryst on the ugly green couch, and I’m listening to Billie Holiday croon, and the time is closing in on 7.30, or maybe even 8 by now. I’m here on this couch, clad in these clothes, these borrowed jeans from Molly Ray that are reminiscent of a pair of pants a different girl once reluctantly gave me. And all of a sudden, Billie Holiday and Molly Ray and yous and mes and these pants and everything they mean are popping around in my brain, and I don’t feel very much in control of any of it, but it all seems so necessarily part of the picture.
They mattered to you, those pants. That metaphor. When I took them over you were sore but felt batty saying so, so you kept quiet. And while you stewed, I wore the hell out of those pants, adding stains that never were, and wearing through both knees with my pedaling, and when I told you I’d finally blown through ‘em, the look you gave me was of loss on such a scale… It said I had robbed you of something, and when I recoiled at the lovelessness of that look, you clucked your tongue and shushed me and gave me a cursory hug, and nothing was made better by that. Which is just to say we weren’t through with the metaphor just yet.
He took them with him on his flight-of-shame back to the mainland, a parting gift of sorts, and he wore them often and indulged in the vanity that came from wearing them and hoped to somehow wear them so much that they’d be remade into a different piece of clothing entirely, one that wouldn’t call to mind the girl that was his physical and spiritual other half, or who felt that way anyway, and whose kinship to him was made manifest, as near he saw it, in a pair of traveling trousers. He wanted to snare a million and a half girls wearing those pants just to spite her, some sort of sidelong shot at her pride or some other half-retarded notion. He took them, though, and wore them as best he could, and lost them, eventually, when his capacity for laziness extended itself beyond warrant or rationale and someone took it upon themselves to shortcut a task he left unfinished. In other words, he left them in the dryer one long weekend, and the cleaning lady tossed ‘em away along with all his underpants and most of his socks.
I didn’t want to tell you and I still don’t.
So ambitious, aren’t we?
The genuflection outside the Men’s Su store.
The Moon Illusion.
Shadows on the sidewalk.
“I like to consider myself a funny character…”
“Where do you get off agreeing with yourself about such a thing?”
So let’s call you the imaginary audience, then. The entity for whom I am writing. To whom. With whom. At whom. About whom. Let’s call me you and you me and you you, too, and then maybe we can carry on with this game. I love you, whomever you are, and your infinite patience for me and my ideas. Let’s call you the audience, because it sounds better than the Other. Than the enemy. Than competition.
