Echo

more and more, i’m feeling that when you find the place, you find the person. but you have to find the time as well. and the place doesn’t have to be permanent. it’s where you meet to decide things.

“Your eyes.”

“My eyes what?”

“They’re very…interesting.”

“How so.”

He took a long sip of beer–he squints when he thinks–made a decision, shook his head.

“I can’t say.”

She stared.

“Fair enough,” she said, in a voice that echoed.

He looked at her as she looked at him. He looked away, laughs nervously.

“What?”

“This is probably gonna sound weird, but I’m just gonna say it. It’s like the way you look at me…you look at me like we’ve already done it. Like you’ve seen me naked and you know all about me so it must have happened, yet I have no memory of it.”

She took a sip of coffee, her eyes floating on the surface of the murk. Her ears were ringing.

between the dead stumps and broken rocks
i dug into the wet sand and found a pebble of time.
when i opened the pebble
it unfolded the most brilliant sunset i’d ever seen.
my first thought was how i was going to capture it all so i could share it with you.

but we haven’t yet met where we said we would.

Written 4/18/05:

To be honest, I left the wedding overwhelmed by my loneliness. Sometimes I see too much, get too deep into people and I wish there were someone I could talk to about how to handle all the impressions I get, the images and the feelings. Sometimes I wish the night lasted forever and we could all lay down our costumes and masks and the roles we play, and just be ourselves under the cover of night. Sometimes I think playing a human being is a hard job because you can’t just exist, unencumbered by contrivance. Every situation demands a different set of social protocol. No one gets to behave “as is” in the light of day. We lose the fluidity and truthfulness of just being.

Why does there exist within me, a cold, logical robot as well as an amorphous emotional being? Why is it so hard to be a human being? When I went in to have Lasik on my eyes, there were complications so it took a long time. They had put anesthetic drops on my eyes, but after everything was said and done, they reapplied the anesthetic on my left eye and operated, then FORGOT to reapply it on my right and operated. I felt the laser slice into me and it was like a slow paper cut on my eyeball, but I didn’t say anything because you’re not supposed to move. It only last a few minutes, but they basically operated on my eye without anesthesia. Sometimes I feel like that’s my experience of life. I don’t go through it numb enough. There’s too much awareness, of things I don’t even need to be aware of. All that’s inevitable…everything gained will eventually be lost. All that we have is borrowed and never owned. Our lifetime is a loan, blessed upon us to gain experience. The people in our lives, our youth, our beauty, our wealth, we give it all up someday, and death is the great equalizer when it’s time to give up our borrowed time and human identities. And there’s such an urgency to be real and for us to understand the very power we have when we are all connected and real, but we’re standing on a stage so it’s hard not to fall into acting within this play that has yet to conclude. Everything is ephemeral and things have to always be in motion but on the outside, there’s one connecting line that runs through every single person and being in existence, and we just get so caught up that we forget that there’s a bigger story beyond pages measured out by single human lifetimes. But to survive in a world built by humans, which plane do we choose to live in?

i’m my dreams we fought last night.

when i woke up, you had left the room.

i can feel your heart.

more than anything, i wish i knew your face.

lots of train whistles in the distance tonight. through the cool fingers of fog, i’m missing you.