absent
minded
testifying
for a life of
blindness
and reconciled
rightness
like a willow
tree
in a springtime
breeze;
like
she I wish
to be.
It’s Sunday evening and I am in Brooklyn wondering how many strangers are in love with me.
The red globe in the sky has gone to bed, tucked into horizon’s bedsheets, and its residue smears a thick layer of orange onto the city. Brooklyn baffles me. Everything is so ordinary, so unbelievably bleak, until you discover all of the art packed into each cubic centimeter. Suddenly that dark bit of gray on the sidewalk transforms into a modern Picasso. The profile of ratty apartments is the opening shot of a short film I’d like to make. If you look just closely enough, you will find that everything you lay your eyes on is glorious. Right now the whole city is dripping with a warm peachy glow, and it makes all of the people around me look like bodies on fire.
Could it be that nothing is actually cast orange and I’m just imagining this? There’s this enormous mustard overpass next to me––what if it’s the only real thing resembling orange in sight? I deem this uncertainty plausible, because the time it takes for me to process the image delays my awareness of it, setting my mind just a moment in the past. In that purgatorial nanosecond between physical and conscious reality, all certainty could disappear. The sun could set a little deeper; the sky could turn a little bluer. My perception of reality becomes nothing but a memory. And what is a memory if not just a rough image of shapes and colors projected onto some TV screen in the back of our minds? Hindsight could be muddling all of the colors together on that little TV screen, and the orange shade of the overpass is dominating the illusion. Hindsight is not, nor has it ever been, 20/20.
Regardless of what color the world is, I am here, under the sloppy trails of retired sunlight, and everything looks warm. It’s unfortunate––this existential uncertainty––but I let myself feel warm with the world despite it.
There’s this sort of electricity twitching through the air tonight. Every atom is charged with excitement––I think that’s where I find the art. Each molecule tickles my senses, making everything feel just a bit more beautiful. The air tickles me in this Brooklyn dust bowl, pushing me to rummage through every pocket of atmosphere in search of inspiration. I have no trouble finding it. Gary Clark Jr., who I believe is Jimi Hendrix reincarnate, is conjuring from the depths of his history a 3/2 polyrhythm laid over a heavy percussion, and the guitar’s distortion and the screaming melodies and the weight of it all is just too much––I can feel myself spilling with sensation.
This is the moment I see the blue-shirted man for the first time. His gaze is removed, mind set in some distant state that isn’t quite accessible to the rest of us. A brown curl twists around the back of his ear, coddling an upward-pointed cigarette fingering the sky like a newborn. A second is lit between his lips.
Suddenly and tremendously, I am in love.
The feeling sits deep in my chest, just above my stomach, yanking at my body and whatever entity lies beyond it. His calmness is hypnotizing. Who is this blue-shirted man? On the little TV screen in my head, I imagine myself weaving through the sea of dirty bodies to ask him for a cigarette, and when he lights it for me, our eyes lock, and I encounter a world of everything and nothing in his glacier eyeballs, his ocean irises, his quasar pupils. In this moment, we both know that we will never feel love like this ever again, so we make a silent promise to link our spirits forever. When our lips touch, not by force of will but by magnetism, our souls exit our bodies and enter one another through the portal our mouths have created. We get so lightheaded because neither of us has ever felt another person’s soul like this before.
Where am I?
It takes a moment for me to remember. When I resume processing sensory input, everything comes flooding back: Brooklyn (note to self: later tonight you’ll take the 7 to Grand Central and Metro North to Tarrytown), music (store in memory: the song being played right now is the most incredible song you’ve ever heard in your life), my friend (note to self: don’t lose him or you’ll get lost), and all of the things I force myself to remember every night (when you get home: take off shoes, turn off lights, don’t wake up parents, take off makeup, wash face, brush teeth, set alarm, plug in phone, shut eyes, breathe, I can’t forget any of this, I can’t forget any of this, I can’t forget any of this!).
We were meant to forget things, that’s why memory is such a flawed form of record keeping. Our bodies are telling us that we are only able to focus on whatever now we are given, not some flimsy grasp on the past. When I first learned this about memory, I was indignant with rage. Each nanosecond is packed with so much thought, thought that consumes our entire being, thought that makes up who we are in any given moment, and it's all just destined for the dark abyss of unconsciousness––it’s destined for nothing. We can’t remember the thoughts we had thirty seconds ago. It makes me want to write all of my thoughts down, to preserve every little part of myself, to track my evolution––and I do, a lot, with poetry. I’ve stopped writing about the boys I think I’m in love with because I’m bored and I’ve started writing about the forest and the rebellion intrinsic to optimistic nihilism and if the anarchist rural utopias I dream of could ever exist and why I can no longer accept the fallacy of God and how special relativity might really be telling us that the inconsistency of time means that there is no cohesive structure to the universe and reality is merely a hoax.
I can recognize absurdity within all of my thoughts, but I ignore that recognition because I figure it’s better to think everything than to only think some things. Better to expand than to remain stagnant. Such is how I’ve convinced myself that any thought, be it silly or profound, is golden. I’ve become addicted to writing them down, casting a literary net for any riches that might be hidden in these cerebral moments. The period of a “moment” only gets smaller and smaller as I think more and more. As a result I find myself constantly discouraged, every day letting more thoughts grace me and drift into the inscrutable unconscious.
I can’t write everything down, so right now in Brooklyn I let the anxiety of knowing my whole self is dying every moment sit somewhere in the back of my brain where it’s harder to reach. Maybe I can let this thought drift away like the rest of my transient monologues, but I deem the effort futile because anxiety is typically more adhesive to the mind than other forms of thought.
I think I shall take a break from thinking.
Perhaps a momentary hiatus––it’ll be like a staycation for my brain! I’ll practice a quick meditation and let my soul recede into peace and spirituality, the world of simultaneous mindfulness and mindlessness. How do we track this thing quantitatively—the mind? It follows no patterns of physics except for the forward propulsion of time. How can we hear sound in our heads? Where is all of this thought taking place? Chemical reactions can only take cognitive function so far––there must be a layer of humanity beyond our primordial survival functions. Is there perhaps another state of existence outside of our perception of physics, one that is neglected by academia but exists nonetheless? The realm of consciousness could be a field of spiritual energy that permeates everything, like the Hindu idea of Brahman, or an Alex Grey painting, or the Luminiferous Ether, but since Einstein dispelled that theory ages ago, more like the Higgs Field. I think Luminiferous Ether sounds prettier.
I don’t think I can stop thinking.
How did this cigarette get in my mouth? Did I finally muster up the courage to approach my love for it? No––I turn my head back and he’s gone. Where did the blue-shirted man go? He’s abandoned his perch that I’ve memorized so well upon staring, which means this cigarette must’ve come from somewhere else, but I don’t try to remember because I have no patience for memory. I was distracted by my thoughts and now I’ve lost the truest love I’ve ever known!
What other things have I lost to my narcissism? I get bored so easily. My mind is always searching for a new toy, a new cerebral playmate. I crave the things that will make me think like I’ve never thought before, push by brain and body to places they’ve never been before. I’ve become addicted to chasing virgin thoughts. Such is the glory of physics. And philosophy. And the woods near my house. I’ve sent my body to corners of the Earth I’ve never explored before to learn them; I’ve consumed what I’d hoped would induce some sort of cathartic, mind-expanding experience; I’ve thrown my body at men to taste the sweet and sour flavors of adulthood, all just to expand my brain’s capacity to understand what the mind and body are capable of.
But these boys I throw myself at don’t love me. Sometimes they tell me I think too much. Sometimes I frighten them. I thought I loved a boy once, but he wouldn’t let me think, and I hated myself for becoming a body without a mind, so I told him I couldn’t love him anymore. Sometimes I see him and wonder if I am still in love with him, but then I remind myself of how he reverted me to a corpse, and my consciousness moves on to the next virtual nothing that will occupy my thoughts for a few seconds.
I’ve yet to feel that earth shattering love where our Atmans (the single soul portion of universal energy) align perfectly and everything in the world that isn’t love disappears. A love that makes every thought in my head dissipate. A love where the only thing my body is capable of feeling is feeling itself.
What if that’s what I’m chasing—the loss of thought altogether? What if my incessant search for meaning is really just a hunt for the explosivity of enlightenment, a nirvana where every internal question is finally silenced?
I think I would’ve had that cathartic type of love, that emptying love, with the blue-shirted man. But I can’t find him now. He’s left me alone with my thoughts. I wonder if he saw the back of my head and thought my hair was too frizzy, so he left in search of a more tamed love. Maybe he didn’t like my outfit––I’ve been wearing a lot of earth tones lately. Maybe he thinks my friend is my lover and is actually lamenting what he, too, knows is a once in a lifetime love. None of this speculation matters though, because the blue-shirted man is gone and soon he will only be a fleck of dust in my irretrievable unconscious. In a few days, I won’t be able to remember what he looks like; I’ll only be able to see the hue of his shirt because it’s the salient color on the TV screen somewhere in my mind.
The blue-shirted man is gone, so I force myself to forget him because I know my memory won’t do justice to the love that we shared. Instead I look to the stars and let Gary’s brooding melodies engulf me with their dark, distorted, wretched sound. The sky is still fairly blue, it hasn’t quite entered total blackness yet. Blue… what a familiar color… something important could be blue… I feel an impulse to remember what, but I don’t indulge it because I’m busy letting the music pull oceans out of my eyes. I didn’t know it was possible for music to be this beautiful. Something else is beautiful… something close to my heart… I don’t immediately know what and I don’t bother trying to remember because all of my energy is busy consuming sound. I look behind me and see a gap in bodies… what used to be there? I don’t fuss with recollection, my brain is too busy perceiving all of the humans around me as flames beneath Gary’s red sonorous heartbreak.
I wonder how many strangers are in love with me.