It’s not easy getting into this place. There’s a back stair and that’s not always accessible. None of it really is. There are pathways and everything, but they get closed without warning.
I remember when I was young, maybe 16, and I was flying in my dreams. It was a marvel, and it happened repeatedly. And then I ruined it by thinking I’d just have to close my eyes and think, “I’m flying tonight.” It was like I thought I owned it, or I was a magician and this was my trick. And It wasn’t, and it was gone. I found it again, much later, when I didn’t think about it like that, and it appeared by the grace of some subconscious banshee.
This thing, this fairy entrance, this slant-lit magic hour is ruined by writing about it, of course. And I’m doing that now. It would be much better to be the well-coached hockey player and say I have no words. Because I don’t. And It’s not Christ. That I know, coach.
Sometimes I think – and maybe still do – I’ve found a short cut with the booze, but that’s a problematic, dull foppery angle. The truth, for what it’s worth, is in the in-between, the waking up, the forgotten, the tuning and staring off and remembering, the walking out back, nobody knowing where you’re off to.
Pit the most empathetic against the least empathetic and use the name Mercedes Verity. That’s where it all begins. She’s just up the back stairs. Right there.
At first, It’s just writing down words, getting from A to B, a clunky miserable slog that makes me feel miserable and worthless, like an unkempt bug-eyed man who scurries in the room, aimlessly moving around, making loud ignorant comments about whatever he notices.
Poop has few friends
It is minimally better the next go around. Still A to B, still clunky, miserable and worthless, but there with flashes, razor thin, something, an echo, a line across the dull grey sky.
Breathing and forgetting are next, lots of that, drinking too, reflecting and reconsidering. Even this, these words now, are feeling wrong, because I should be doing the sad reflecting. And I’m not. I’m rushing it. That’s the worst, making it the same awful thing at the outset.
Mountain goat skeleton in the Italian Alps
And then – good thing I got out of that – there is the crack, a way in, that meaty spark, a thing I was after, sharp and wonderful, until I reach for it and find it gone, never even there. I was drunk or wish I was.
The animal skulks about in the shadows, on the periphery, until it’s a mania of spinning my head, thinking I have something to say, knowing I’m a degenerate. The words are there but it’s still a morass – mole asses! – too much of that, and the drinking is my friend again, and I realize it’s time to give everything up. It never made sense. The drink was to blame. The repercussions are all there is, living the straight and narrow, facing judgement, crying for meaning, needing and almost finding that clear and consistent moral code, finally done with my childish nonsense.
I will wake up hurting
Gone and almost forgotten, I stupidly think it might be time to return, peak and see if that squirrely thing was ever there. And I do. And it was. It is. There are sparks and flames now, as shitty a metaphor as that might be, because I’ve got better things to do. I race after it and can’t stop until I do and realize I was wrong and that drink is to blame.
Time is the thing now, the breathing and forgetting, the drink, yes, too. Until it’s time again, or well past, and it opens just like that, the clunky thing still there, only needing a structural fix, deleting and editing, that on repeat, until there is something, a character more real than I know, a thing with meaning, not flailing and spouting, but sharp and clear, and not so much of that as to make it copy, but the sheen and wet of heavy footsteps bounding off to an end I know not of.
On the way to a Greenlandic summit
He doesn’t follow Emily up the stairs! He’s too chicken for that. He’s pretending that he will but stops and stares blankly as she vanishes and turns and makes a run for it. He’s free! No, he runs straight into his boss who he has to escort him into the party. He’s doomed and reaches for the first glass of champagne he can lay his hands on.
Anyway, I feel better about the book even if I know it won’t last.
I’ve had a couple of relationships go belly up in recent years and been flummoxed by these vanishings. Stupid things were said, and surprisingly it wasn’t me either time. I reached out to them in both instances to help move us past the conflict. However, instead of resolution, they stopped answering.
I tried to re-engage, only to realize that the problem wasn’t something I should do or say, but that they couldn’t engage because they didn’t want to face their shame. That’s what I represented, a memory of something stupid they had done. Rather than deal with the issue, it was easier to cancel me.
This has been a revelation for me not just in my personal relationships, but in today’s politics. It is impossible for Trump to take any of his horrible nonsense back. He cannot reflect or reconsider. Neither he nor his supporters cannot face what they have done. It’s easier just to head off the cliff then face their shame.
