Posts published in December 2009

She woke and found him gone.  She cleared the gunk from her eyes and stared out the window at the gray day outside, the kind of day that never cleared up, but never rained.  She stretched and looked around the room, tidy, minimal, nice big windows.  And high off the ground.  She suspected that the view was great on clear days.  

Though she did not fully recall what happened here or how she got here, mostly, or the name of the man whose apartment this was, her clothes were still on which told her that she was, in the very least, not a complete tramp the night before.  That was always a nice thing to discover.  She hated the alternative.  She rolled on her back and felt something dig into her spine, realized that she still had her bra on, and sat up.  I guess I was better than I suspected, she thought.  Upon sitting up, her head swam and he consciousness swayed, found a handhold, and righted itself.  

“Whoa,” she whispered ad rubbed her face.  Today was going to be an interesting one.  Before she could deal with the impending misery this afternoon held and all the ‘cuddled under a blanket half-comatose on the couch’ness of it all, she had to figure out how to get home.  But more importantly than that, she had to pee which meant finding the bathroom.  She had never been a fan of peeing in her pants or the bed and she had no intention of starting now.  She stood, buckled her pants, and stumbled across the room, passing the alarm clock on the dresser which yelled “9:15” at her in angry red letters.  She hated alarm clocks, so fucking smug.

His blood was boiling.  He could not take his eyes off them.  Everywhere.  Every unrestrained jiggle.  Every poorly padded nipple.  Every sweet, shapely ass.  Every curve, every bulge, every stolen glance down the shirt.  His blood seethed right behind the eyeballs and his lizard brain screamed its primordial mating call in the subconscious recesses of his self.  There were beautiful women everywhere and he felt utterly powerless to resist them.  The streets were a minefield of libidinous hazards.  He had to hide or he feared his head might explode, hormones rushing through him, torrential, violent, powerful.  

Yet, sitting there alone in the cafe sipping his tepid coffee and staring at the buxom brunette with the fancy Italian-named drink he could never hope to pronounce correctly, he suddenly felt very old.  His suit felt like shackles, the unfulfilled dream of his squandered youth.  His graying hair another reminder of his drained virility.  His belly hanging over his 15 dollar belt a harbinger of the end.  His sad, useless life in decline.

He wanted so badly to bury his face between the young supple breasts of the brunette he had been staring at for almost an hour that he could almost feel the warmth of her breath on his threadbare scalp and smell the secret drop of perfume he suspected she placed in her cleavage, a reward for any man lucky enough to find his nose there.  But not for him.  Never for him.  His days of unrestrained lust were behind him, memories of the way things should have been but were not.  Now he was relegated to the role of suffering silent observer.  There was not a woman in the whole world that would look upon his tired paunch with desire and he knew it.  And he felt it.  He felt it in the very core of his loins.  Everything was lost.

I stood at the corner by the diner lost in thought waiting for the stupid red hand to turn into the stupid little man.  I thought about something that seemed really important at the time, but that I’m having trouble recalling now.  It was work, or a girl, or something.  Normal stuff, really.  The kind of utterly regular garbage a person spends so much of their life obsessing over that is, in the end, completely unimportant.  It’s funny what your brain thinks is important in the moment.

Anyway, I was at this corner, waiting to cross so I could go down into the subway and then to work, which was really exciting.  The air was crisp with the onset of autumn and I was wearing a jacket.  Morning was bustling with people on their way to work.  Garbage trucks roared down the street collecting the diverse refuse of the neighborhood.  The day was starting like thousands of others had.

And then behind me I hear a man’s voice say, “Excuse me, sir?”  I turned around because I am, apparently, one of those people that always looks like he knows how to get everywhere and so am asked regularly for directions.  Prepared to tell this guy that Grand Street is four blocks down, he just has to keep going, I was shocked to see him standing there in what I thought at the moment was one of those Renaissance Faire costumes, but which I would later learn was formal wear of the late 18th Century.

“Uh…”  I couldn’t say anything I was so shocked by this guy’s appearance.  I lived in a particularly funky neighborhood in Brooklyn and I was used to seeing people dressed up in all sorts of crazy shit—dudes in dresses, chicks like they’re from the 1940s, people riding those weird tall old bicycles.  But this guy in his crazy history outfit had me dumbfounded.  I eked out, “Yeah?” after a moment.

These fists.  These fists have known such discord as I cannot begin to recount.  In times before men lived upon this land, I rode across it, aimless.  I knew neither form nor consciousness, yet I was.  I remember those times, but I do not remember being.  And then the first men crossed the ice bridge in the north and spread down, adapting, changing, learning to live in this hostile, giving land.  And they told stories of the wind and the night and the lightning and the thunder.  They told stories of the great tusked beasts that roamed the land, of the fire that burnt the forests, of the place they went when they died.  They sought to make sense of so many things they knew nothing about, so they used what they knew—the animals, the birds, the seasons, the plants.  Each little group of these men created a web of stories, of belief, about the genesis of this place.  They created symbols to explain the inexplicable.  They gave names to the things and places and moments and stars that had no names, never knew they needed to be named.  It was then that I took form, though I was and am known by many different names to many different people.  As the years progress, I am known less and less.  My form has become a blending of so many cultures and traditions and ideas, the sum of so many thoughts, that I have become hard to recognize to all except the most attune to the natural world.  The modernization of the world has drained my once vibrant colors.  So few still believe, but I shall never cease to be for deep within them they know I am there.  To some, I am a benefactor, bringing with me change and growth and development.  To others, I am a malefactor, ushering in the end of an age, the death of what they had always known.  To be fair, I have never been either of these things.  My role is subject to their interpretation, to the context of the situation.  I only am.  I will only be.  I will continue to ride as long as the sun rises and sets.

And though I am impartial, my time amongst the people has imbued me with something like what they call emotion.  I have found myself taking part in their struggles, often against my better judgment.  When I have had time to stop and think about it—such a strange thing thinking—I recognized that my role is only to lead the change, not to fight for or against it.  Yet that is what I do.  I take sides.  While so many people thought I was preventing change from taking place, I knew that change would happen regardless.  Nothing can stop the change once it begins.

And here, again, I embarked on this cycle of change and rebirth, the cycle of death and destruction, leading the vanguard of discord to welcome an era of concord in my wake.  But on whose side shall I fight?  Whose blood shall I spill?  What shape shall the future take when my role, for the moment, is done?