Outside it is quiet. Outside it is 5am. Encroaching winter cold calms the foliage until it is eerily still, nothing stirs; the birds aren’t even awake. Everything seems absent, abandoned, alone. My only company, year after year, from walks here and there, in my imagination and in real life, before the sun rises, always, Venus.
She looks down, a whisper of of luminescence, a silver bauble. She winks and promises to return. Next morning, she’s there waiting again, pulling the stars and other planets across the sky; an epic, million-year-old symphony—comforting in its promise to continue, in its desire to move despite your existence. You may acknowledge it—and somehow it feels like it’s acknowledging you.
A place you can never, will never go; a place composed of poetic stanzas and perfectly knotted paragraphs, with promises of moments that will never happen to you, to me, to us. We are always kind of alone. Our innermost hiding place is usually hibernating. It is usually cold, isolated, afraid, distant. The tundra amidst vibrancy, radiance, energy. Venus ignites this and that reminds me THAT in my pretend place where I am mostly alone, I have lived a thousand lives with a thousand pretend and real people, been on trains and trips, in different countries, planets, said different words, married different men, made movies and pornography, written novels, never grew up.
It is more beautiful to pretend that you will do these things than try and fail. Hemingway knew it.
Autumn is a season of ghosts. Ghosts of nostalgia. They march in with lanterns, burning incense, transmogrified, wearing layers of decaying leaves and lace-capes made of snow and they hint to smells and promises never kept and years past that we can never reclaim. Inevitably, they grow weaker every year, unable to carry the burden of our past lives, our past autumns. The memories to be rekindled become less and less as we become more disenchanted with hope, the past and rebirth.
The entire sequence of everything: from our collective globular, fiery beginnings, to every storm, bug, gust, hut, home, mountain, moment, kiss, tingle, tickle, sex position, person, planet, putsch, promise, rape, rapture, song, war, birth, breath, comet, quake, book, poem, death or autumn that led to our existence, here now. Every thing that had to happen so that when while walking at 5am, I was hit with a particular raindrop, that I smelled a particular shade of wet earth, that I saw and cared about that particular glowing body. That I am in my particular body. That I am here and I love your particular body. I do love your particular body.
What is love and what does it feel like? The commitments and promises we make are so intangible, so forgettable, so weak. These are all mysteries to me, overwhelming, dependable, beautiful, mysteries. They are mysteries that are worth going to sleep and waking up for, so we can dream and pretend, so that we can maybe play and smile and do something worthwhile for ourselves and someone else. Always for someone else. It is true love if it keeps you walking but maybe not feeling and then sometimes feeling (too too much). And you write something. And you feel even more than love. You are in love. With the view of the hillside farms and forests. With the animals that you care for. With the animals you’ll never meet. With the people you pretended to love. With moments that are now memories and the moments that will soon be memories. With the beginning and the end. With infinity and its promise to always be there even when you’re not.
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| now you can go to sleep. |
