THOSE WHO SUFFER LOVE
Fucked, fucked, fucked, fucked.
Whenever I think of being alone, being solitary and doing things alone because that's the only way I've ever done them... I can't imagine them as anything other than total exceptions. Being with everybody, anybody, I swear, I swear it just makes my skin crawl and my ears ring and my jaw clench and my head hurt. I need people of endless calm. Everyone else is just grinding gears and loud noises and frenetic energy. Everybody. Everybody is racous and insane and insensitive and crazy. I would like some people around whom quiet was not bad. Quiet speech and quiet words and quiet humor.
I want to take them out driving, driving as far as we can, and I don't want to hear any yelling at all and no arguing and not pushing and no one trying to out anything of anybody, and I want to put on a record and have it just be alright and have it just be... I don't know. Understood. Everything is shouting. Everything is stupid and disjointed.
I just...
There's fun and there's idiocy.
I want to talk with someone rather than talk at them.
I did anger for so long. I did all of it; I wore it out. Everybody's still caught up inside of it, and they still don't even know.
I don't even have anything in common with anybody. I don't know. First I didn't know anything and then I thought I was different. And then I convinced myself that I was exactly the same.
Now I just know that I'm several steps ahead.
It's the time to be outside and be alone and feel expansive and connected.
The only time I am who I am is when I'm around my family, and that's mostly in retrospective, anyway. I don't go out with anybody else, anyway. I like their calm. I like that you can be stupid without being so crazy.
I do things for other people and I don't even think about them, and I never expect anything back. I don't want anything.
Nothing from them, anyway.
I just... All of this... It hurts to even hear the spark of possibility, of plausibility on anyone's lips. For some reason that makes it seem so much farther away.
I was walking outside and it was windy and the sky was that blue that the oceans makes and the purple the time makes, and the violent pink and the orange. And I stood there, standing right there at the cliff and watching this one, single surfer sitting out in the middle of the water. Just sitting there. And I watching him for such a long time and I don't know why. He never moved. And it reminded me of that summer I spent on vicodon, where we just laid around in lounge chairs on the deck in somebody else's house in Laguna Beach, feeling the mist wrap around the hills and listening to stories about the war, the old war, the capitol w war that was, by all who were present, still an honorable war, maybe the last honorable war, and about the sixties and the London transit and about child support services and sometimes speaking in French and sometimes not, and about that other summer we spent in the Redwoods, driving and driving and driving and never getting anywhere and drinking tea that somehow didn't taste bad and reading about a hundred books and standing barefoot in the twisty river, thinking about the eels, and all that old, dusty furniture and music with cellos and food with blueberries, and of the island and those days we went outside and picked fruit and the others where went in his boat and took the dog and went and went and went and never got anywhere, but felt the rain on our faces, and eating Mexican food and corn on the cob late, late at night because that is the only thing one can eat on nights like those. And about that summer in Cumbria and walking in the ruins of that old and ancient church and the old and ancient headstones, taller than two of any of us and all worn down and beaten by the wind and the rain and years and years and years, and about the town and how far a drive it was, all through the woods, but how if you rounded that one certain bend, you'd all of a sudden see all of it. And about standing on the shore and being freezing, freezing cold and my dad collecting rocks and not being allowed to touch the water and of my aunt's plain, tiny house and her being so very, very old and feeding us ice cream off TV trays and playing go fish with so many people- looking back, I don't know who any of them were, but they were all so old- and of my grandma opening her blouse and showing me the scar from her surgery. And of walking in some little town, some little town that looked like all the other towns with some older people who looked like all ther other people who I didn't know, a man and a woman, and them both being very nice and walking to a store on the corner, up a hill, and him buying me a Creme egg, and giving me that doll I still have in my closet, and how they are the only people in my whole life who have ever given me a doll and how that doll is still the only doll I have ever owned. And off the train with the low roof and eating egg salad sandwiches with pickles, which I don't like, and staring at the stream below us and thinking about things that I only ever read about and about that pub in Kerry and the drunk men behind us and the food being so good because we were so tired and so hungry and how different my grandma seemed there than she does here. I remember walking down tiny, winding streets with stones for pavement and shops like the kind of shops you'd think they have, and of all the churches, of all the churches, especially that one in York, not the big one, the small one, the tiny one, that was almost totally made of mold and was so small.
And I thought about New Orleans and that sticky cool you felt so late at night, listening to the sounds of the outside, and of driving through the garden district, and of thinking things I hadn't ever thought of before, and how that same, still sticky calm was there the second time but all you felt is heavy and dreary and stiff, even though you did not want to. And about wanting to cry for loving it and cry for losing it and cry about never, ever being able to do enough.
And I thought about that that summer in San Antonio and getting so many nosebleeds and everything being so hot and so humid and writing poetry and feeling empty and how after awhile, I didn't even care that I would bleed anymore, and I'd just let it go until it stopped without doing anything sometimes, watching it in the mirror, and how it ran down into my teeth.
And now I'm thinking back on New Orleans and I'm going to cry and I can't explain it, only that it is, only that all of that and all the feeling of all that, all that love and all that outside and all those summers, summer after summer after summer, how that's what it was like, only watching them crumpled and broken and dying and empty.
And it doesn't even matter because the night, tonight, all nights from here until August will feel exactly the same, and they will still be for feeling infinite and still for feeling alone and still for lighting candles and for life being good and being alright and listening to the kinds of records reserved only for nights like those.
And it is what it is, and that's always enough, I suppose.