Waffles and guns

1
(Hello) There’s someone I’d like you to meet. X does your job and does it better than you. X is well liked and we like X more than you. You may have expected us to be able to read minds, but allow us to demonstrate we obviously can’t: Mr X is on the cover of the metaphoric Time Magazine, love, tell us - do you mind?

2
A false memory is a memory of an event that did not happen or is a distortion of an event that did occur as determined by externally corroborated facts.

“Therapists who adopt a suggestive approach when the patient tries to recall memories, are at risk of creating false memories whose content is related to the suggestion used. This is particularly true of situations in which the therapist is trying to account for a patient’s symptoms in terms, for instance, of a possible trauma in their past.”

3
I’ve seen it before, he says. Yes, I’ve seen it before too. Frown, scepticism in the corner of his mouth. I made decisions last time, I don’t say. My new year’s resolution? It’s Don’t do stupid shit. I don’t say this either. Don’t fucking underestimate my intelligence, I don’t say. Just be cool with him for a while, he says.

I promise I’m nowhere near uncool, I say. You’re right, I don’t say. I was blind until you brought it up and now I don’t know who to be angry with, I don’t say. Are you overestimating me, I don’t ask.

I used to dream, I don’t say. I woke at 3:04 am as faces blended with each other and I wanted to scream. I don’t want to say much at all. Don’t do stupid shit.

1
Of course I don’t mind. Of course it’s fine. Of course, I’m not going to have you digging through your most polite ways to say I’m second best.

2
But I don’t know if this did not happen. I don’t know if this is a distortion. I know shitty and I know sleepless. I know no suggestive therapist. I know any number of suggestive news stories, everyday entertainment, noble causes. The suggestion is written in concrete if you decide to look at it that way. I don’t know if this is a distortion. Fuck you.

3
It all comes down to distance and dreams. I’ll leave it at that, hun, but I need a few promises: Do not tie my name to the virtues you need the most. Do not, in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence, view me as the saviour of any kind of heart. Don’t expect me to have a heart at your disposal. Don’t be drawn to me for my principles and then expect to be the exception. I don’t make exceptions. And know this: I know about blindness. It’s all distance and dreams.

It is my decision to share my triumph with you. I did not know it when I first took your old dog tags from the tobacco box they’d been stored in. No, I could not have explained why i did that, beyond the obvious: mortification at having lost the first relic, the mourner’s need to obtain another.

The past days, they’ve highlighted all those things in myself which encourage self loathing: not because of the qualities by themselves, but because of my awareness of them, my frustration with them, and the absence of any effort to rid myself of them. I have no concept of time. I willingly allow fiction to devour me as soon as it appears the alternative comes with sharper teeth. I panic easily. I spend the time thinking of possible escape routes, rather than the task at hand. A pathetic domino effect: I break any other appointment I may have had. I know how to be thorough in my messes.

But - to fill in the circle back to my first paragraph - I finished. I have not shown it yet, have not even prepared my work for its evaluation, but it has been finished. I fidget with the cold metal chain around my neck, and suggest to myself the idea that I did it for you. That I do it for you.

And I am lying. My choices are not made in your name, but in mine. This has been and will be the truth; I would have liked to say I do this for you. I, however, take pride in my thickheaded behaviour; It is a victory, more so than a loss, that, ultimately, I am only ever my own agent.

Yet, I reasoned you would be able to appreciate the gesture. It is winter. It feels like the very same incessant winter since they buried you. I have a small victory in my pocket, and I have learned to share it with you.

I would have wanted to ask what it is you dream of, but I was, selfishly, distracted by my own dreams. The time it takes to circle the knots in my head: it’s too long to reasonably pick up a conversation where it trailed off. I could tell you that I think these things (that your words aren’t simply disappearing in the gap), I could, in my blunt manner, tell you all the things I think. This is one of them: I have become too scared to approach those individuals I would most want to know. Shyness is not the reason - rather the opposite: If I trusted your (anyone’s) integrity, I wouldn’t hesitate.

Though, that is not the first thought I would choose to share. It would sound more like good night.

Vast silence is not the gift I would offer you if I could choose it away, but here it is; a full dictionary of the words I can’t find, and it is yours.

“He says I should try to get to know her. I think it’s silly.”
“I dunno”, I say, turning my head from an endless pile of paragraphs. “I don’t think you should ever get to know anyone, it only makes them more annoying.”

The night sky has no numbers floating in it.
Yet this is my one obsessive-compulsive habit: I play connect-the-dots with the stars until sunrise.

Irritation is an animal which lives
together with Self Pity, in your throat.
They threw Perspective out last night.

Please don’t try to justify your little growl:
You are tired. It’s been a long day.
“Surely, no one can smile all the time.”

Here - this is Proper Conduct’s address.

“Thanks”, I attempted to say, “But I don’t make sense.”

You disconnect and reconnect. How to count detachments when there are no attachments? Five-six-seventeen-six thousand-and-twenty-one - I throw my voice out to anchor myself to my own text, I stumble on keyboards scattered on the floor, this is real, did you ever doubt I was real, there being reality between the lines? Sometimes a scene plays out with all the wrong faces - sometimes, perhaps, it’s all right, it’s okay, just in the wrong places. Sometimes I don’t know what was dream and what was not. Sometimes I forget what words I wanted you to have and which ones you really got. Sometimes, most times, I assume you heard me, yelling at you from across the decade, hours of lecturing sidewalks, and I just wait for you to extract your apologies from the pavement. Can you measure the amount of mercury in my nose? Can you tell how much glue is left underneath your feet?

Thanks, I attempted to say, but-

I carry a notebook now, did I tell you? In which to keep track of all the shiniest stars. In which I write not questions nor answers, no memories or dreams, just sentences to confirm step one and what ought to be step two. It was intended as an anchor. Words, you know, I would believe in the staying power or words, of ballpoint pens, caught-in-fist inkstains. Give a thing a name and it is no longer just a thing. Stars are there for hitching wagons to. Give it words, and it starts to look like a promise. Promises, heavy with integrity, are, ought to be, should very well be, anchors.

What kind of ship needs 54 pages worth of anchors?
Can you find a single apple, or a wagon to keep it in?

“Thanks”, I typed, politely, “but I’m all out of glue.”

The heat sinks into cobblestones and stretches of pavement, clouds over, dusts down, blends with the rotting vegetables changing hands in the street, clouded over, dusted down by the sea.

They call it the city of poets now, on envelope fronts and newspaper stamps. Poets fled this town, I was taught. Poets were imprisoned, their abilities questioned, forgotten about, hushed down. This I was taught, I know, and I watch the large vehicles float by, the faces of these poets smeared out in large print, their names calligraphed and golden.

Sometimes he would come, when she was still much younger than he was, to read to them. He knew about stories. He carried books. This I was told. Sometimes he would try to teach them the words. He chose the words which never had reason to flee, ones never clouded over, dusted down.

“I was creative too.” Shifting feet, dry paintbrushes on canvas landscapes. “Until I laid off the cocaine, y’know.” I know about stories. These I am told.

One lighter patiently changing hands, collecting brief touches, carrying conversations. Future is seeping in, under the clouds, under the dust. We exchange words, these alternate futures and I. The one adjusts her face in a mirror, the second alters her intonation at a telephone. I, the third, the fourth, the fifteenth, find myself speaking their language - considering, at length, whether to be ashamed of this practise, of borrowing a tongue I rid myself of as soon as I knew how to. There is safety in abandoned houses. There is pride in the unchanging. This I was taught.

“How did Noah build all the cages”, the one says, “to keep all the animals in?”

You grow older.

You learn that the puzzle pieces to make a person aren’t as many as you thought back when you first opened the box. You come to recognise traits in the new people you meet; each one tearing another bit out of the posters of past heroes in your heart. You name a tone of voice after the first to use it; you refer to the particular twist of a smile by the name of he who first showed it to you. Scents become places; the sounds translate to years. You cry - because you, too, are built out of pieces duplicated and found in other people’s boxes, because one of those pieces is imprinted with the childhood ideas of snowflakes.

You will have no part in this conversation. You feel justified in that this eager voice, this oddly improper laugh, is a puzzle you solved once already, under a different name, in a different street. You consider the ease with which you lapse back into melancholy; you are inspired to smile as you close your eyes and face the April sun.

You remember, with a bit of an effort, that the snow, once it’s fallen, turns out yellowed and filthy.