WIP [Holly]

In Pasadena from the years 1982 until 85 there lived a woman named Holly Carver. A series of small decisions had brought her there, but for reasons soon described she would be compelled to leave and move to the northern suburbs of Chicago. During that time Holly rented a second floor apartment on Goodlawn Avenue with a girl she’d met in college. Looking back on their time as friends and roommates, Holly would wonder whether they’d been brought together not by fate or coincidence but by assonance. Polly Masterson, Holly Carver, Holly and Polly, “Hollypolly” as their friends had called them. This apartment on Goodlawn had been given a nickname also, one they admittedly enjoyed when their friend Cash had coined it: “Hollypollywood”. Such improvisations one can expect among people in their early twenties with a measure of inherited wealth, a talent for boredom, for resolving it, and a lifetime of aspiration and confusion ahead of them. No sooner do they invent a shared argot to insulate themselves from others’ understanding them too often, too well, than they obscure one another’s true feelings for each other along the way. Sometime during the three years they lived together, Holly tired of being playfully bonded to her roommate by tricks of speech. She was her own person. She was to be taken seriously. At her twenty-fourth birthday party, a gathering of old and newish friends at the apartment, she’d blown out all twenty-four candles Polly had somehow managed to stuff into a single cupcake, with the wish that the next year would liberate her from safe established patterns, retrograde habits of living. New city, new apartment, new job. New self. That above all else: new self. Intuition told her it wouldn’t be as easy as drawing in as much air as her lungs could hold, pursing lips to blow out every little flame dancing atop every little candle. She’d have to change the fundamentals of her life bit by bit, dismantle the exoskeleton so softer parts of herself might grow into fresher, more liberating dimensions. 

Two months later one morning she walked into the kitchen where Polly sat sipping coffee, reading a trashy romance novel, told her: she had taken a job as a paralegal at a firm in Chicago, would be moving out at the end of the month. She was sorry to leave Polly so little time to find another roommate. So she hoped Polly didn’t mind, but she had taken the liberty of talking with their mutual friend from college, Shay, who she knew had been planning to move to the area. Shay was looking for a place to live and Holly had mentioned the apartment as an option. “Yeah, that works fine, I like Shay,” Polly said. “But why?” Holly knew what Polly was asking, but chose to feign innocence on the matter, reaching instead for the neutrality of platitudes. “This was nice, it was great. But we both knew it wasn’t going to last forever. Next year I’ll turn twenty-five. I need to switch things up if I’m going to get anywhere by the time I’m thirty.” Then: “God, why do I feel so old! Do you? Do you feel like you’re cheating yourself all the time allowing yourself to feel so damn old already?” Polly didn’t feel this, but theoretically it made sense to her. She wished her friend well. By the end of May, Holly had packed a U-Haul trailer full of her belongings and left to cross the West then the Midwest, towards an even smaller apartment a few blocks from the shore of Lake Michigan, in Wilmette. Holly would never see Polly again and sadly but with some satisfaction knew it. 

Among the many reasons to move to a city or country, some practical, others existential, a desire to be thrown into the unknown is not unusual, with the hope it will accomplish a more implicit, maybe even illicit desire: to revise oneself into a new person. Some will even go so far as to change their name and life story, to complicate ties to a past they’d rather not acknowledge, shed an identity a judge’s verdict had placed on them: thief, dealer, murderer. People rarely bear the power of fostering another’s reputation with grace or charity, for a good reputation is rarely interesting, whereas a bad one is exciting, and circulating that excitement through gossip is a pass-time not yet soon to outwear its welcome among the human species. To her knowledge, Holly didn’t leave behind a clutch of unfavorable opinions. She was popular among her friends and far as she knew flattering descriptors clung to her memory. Smart, funny, kind-hearted, occasionally mischievous. But who did that describe exactly, she was inclined to ask. It could describe any number of people and not her specifically. So it was maybe the first truly interesting thing Holly had done in her short, already long life—to abandon a good reputation. And moreover, to do so without a solid reason. Chalk it up to the wisdom that supposedly came as a consolation prize to the successive indignities of aging: a good reputation was but a subtler burden than a bad one, determining the course of a life through incentives instead of punishments. Since she’d been a well-mannered rule-follower in her teenage years, she considered this her first true act of rebellion. She would chose to contradict the incentives that had been seemingly laid out for her to take, one after the other, each along a path leading through marriage, family, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. Instead she forced a detour and moved to a forgettable pretty town on the outskirts of Chicago. She knew no one in the city. She was a stranger though a neighbor, a new co-worker, a commuter. Over the telephone her parents informed her they were terrified. Over the same telephone her older sister told her she was bewildered to see her suddenly so adventurous, but encouraged her. What a gutsy move, she said. If she was younger and could do her twenties over, she’d do the same. 

Five days a week Holly drove to a parking lot on edge of the city, at the northernmost train station. From there she took an El toward the downtown loop. At North and Wacker, she stepped off and walked five blocks to the large glass office building where she worked. It was as if through various stages of grogginess her morning commute woke the entire city up along with her. A few people standing politely at the northern station; stop by stop, the train gradually filling with more people; city busier and busier out the window; stepping onto the platform amongst a wild bustle that flowed up stairs and onto sidewalks. By the time she strode among others in a crowd, keeping pace, she was wholly anonymous sipping coffee from a travel mug. This sensation, of being one small part of an energetic many, what to call it? It was, she couldn’t find another word for it that wasn’t pompous or embarrassing, metaphysical. A big concept with humble beginnings, Holly carrying purse and coffee into Sears Tower.

To arrive at her office door on the 75th floor required a kind of metaphysical travel, riding an elevator among a mixed company of workmates and strangers, each stepping off at an appointed floor. The interiors of the building floated past unseen, but Holly could imagine a few people she had just seen, shared an elevator ride with, walking through hypothetical offices, beneath hypothetical florescent lights. Some worked in law offices, others in accounting, real estate, generic domains of trade that offered few details to distinguish one from the other, each employee dressed in slacks and button-down shirts, skirts and blouses. It was a modest self-same business, devoting hours of one’s life to working on a specific floor of such a building. But this is what she’d sought, wasn’t it, moving halfway across the country? To live as herself in novel surroundings. Which is to say: an office in Pasadena was not the same as an office in Chicago. Here she found the environs of paralegalhood transformed by sheer numbers, law practices, offices; here just lifting a bagel off its napkin, taking a bite of it, setting it back down, she partook in a hive-mind plurality. The lawyers she was assigned to, Fable Green, an associate, and Charles Thrasher, a junior partner, “Charlie”, as he’d requested she call him, though she never did, warned away from the invitation by another paralegal, Dana, who’d advised stricter collegiality with the man. 

Her first month working in the building Holly caught panoramic glimpses of the city through the windows of her work-lords. Handing a folder to one of them, waiting for feedback or future orders, she’d allow her eyes to wander beyond tinted glass to view the sheer spread of  city blocks to the south and west, streets trickling to vanishing points. It was a view any one working in such offices were doomed to grow accustomed to. Lucky her, to be granted audience with it only a few minutes at a time, every day or so. It would take her longer to lose the low-key feelings of enchantment that stirred when she watched a metropolis reduced to a trillion tiny intricacies. Her office, it should be said, was windowless and cramped, large enough to contain a desk, chair, and file cabinet. 

Of the lawyers she worked for, Thrasher and Green, the former was more tolerable, the latter a bit irritating. Fable Green had also insisted Holly address her in the familiar but Holly sensed any response that deviated from the request would be taken as a slight, a modest subtle rebuff. The dance between professionalism and overfamiliarity began here, with names, Holly knew, but soon extended to work hours, personal information, a capacity to say yes or no without being made to feel guilty, or worse, criticized. Fable’s office was the smaller of the two but more organized, no loose papers as in Charles’ office, certainly none arranged in random stacks on the floor which, entering the door, she’d have to step around to reach the chair she’d then have to wait standing beside before receiving formal invitation to sit. The invitation would often not come, Charles distracted by a phone call or some nuisance of information on his computer screen, and she’d be left to stand, his eyes not lifting yet to acknowledge her. High-strung, fiercely caffeinated, Fable cut a disconcerting figure for she rarely would be found sitting or behind her desk but pacing, “dancing in circles” in her words, fingers of one free hand typing the air while the other hand held a sheaf of pages. She was brilliant but acute in her style of address, quick nips at the recipient of whatever request or observation or query she was making. Did the woman sleep? Did she ever reach a state of calm enough to sit, much less lay down? When Holly stepped into Fable’s doorway, door usually open, nine times out of ten Fable was already staring doorwards, stark blue eyes wide and wired. Out of habit Holly would knock on the door and this would snap Fable from intense stillness, get her gesticulating, talking. The woman, Holly thought, would be a court stenographer’s nightmare. 

Then came the needling questions. Had Holly had lunch yet? (Prelude to inviting herself to lunch along with Holly.) Did Holly think it was chilly in the office? (Possible foray into Holly’s honest feelings about her.) Was that draft of Simmons filing ready yet? (Test of Holly’s ongoing internalized awareness of Fable’s own anxiety-driven priorities, since the filing was due for a week, and Fable was one to work ahead.) To converse with the Fable Greens of this world is to forever be put on one’s back foot, knocked off balance. Holly had learned from early experience working for demanding task-masters that dodging direct inquiries with non-committal pleasantries wouldn’t do. You had to be simple and clean with your excuses and most importantly had to hew close to the factual. No, she always brought her own lunch. No, the temperature seemed just fine. Yes, the draft of the filing was almost finished. In fact, she’d come by just now to let her know Fable could expect it done by early afternoon. Did Fable need it finished, though, before lunch, or could it wait an hour or so? 

It was a shame Fable was always in the office but rarely distractable, since the view from her window was ideal for amateur omniscient contemplation. The first day she’d visited Fable’s office in company of the secretarial manager, a tall broad-shouldered woman named Zuzanna, among their introductions the woman had commented on the sight of the Neo Center, second tallest building in the city, a dark gleaming finger poking from the rainy hazy horizon outside. Fable hadn’t turned to acknowledge it then nor did she since. It’s as if she couldn’t see beyond windows or had never been taught to care. What was jittering on inside her nerves and mind was the most immediate thing, the most acutely tangible. The rest was decoration and she could do without it. 

Holly didn’t risk offending Fable by allowing her eyes to wander. Fable’s blue eyes demanded full reciprocity of attention, so breaking away from them to satisfy curiosity at the window would be read as dissent or at the very least a subtle power move. Since it was forbidden, this made the view all the more alluring. On overcast days she’d attempt to catch a glimpse of the cityscape reflected just over Holly’s shoulder in the glass of a framed photograph, but the reflection was vague, unsatisfying, out-of-focus. More than once she felt aggravated to the point of turning to admire the view, regardless of consequences. If she did, she knew she might never be allowed in the office again. Reassigned to a different attorney, she’d lose access to the city seen from this specific height, this particular angle. All the more alluring because impermissible. 

Finding there what you’ve been looking for? her sister asked across two thousand miles of telephone wire. 

First time the question was asked, she didn’t have an answer. A few months later, she felt confident enough to report: wait, she had. Perspective, a birds-eye view, the kind only tall buildings can provide. Life in Pasadena had kept her low to ground. Here she was in the clouds, looking down, surveying the melee of living from an immortal height. 

But you’re afraid of heights, aren’t you? 

Her sister wasn’t wrong. Holly couldn’t step on an airplane without swallowing two Valium. 

That might be changing, she told her. Maybe there was something about these heights viewed from office windows. 

Streets and cars and buildings and trains and tiny, tiny people. It was like staring at a painting whose details were forever in movement. So much to consider. So many sights to zoom in on, track a while with squinted eyes, zoom back out to appreciate its place in the larger pattern. Enough to give an atheist like her a brief taste of divine intelligence. Though she didn’t believe in god, she could enjoy the view. 

Her firm, Schiff, Hardin, & Waite, rented the 74th, 75th, and 76th floors. On windy days, her little windowless office would creak and sway. Doing their tour of the offices her first day, Zuzanna had warned from time to time the building rocked like a ship on water. Many employees, her included, kept dramamine in their desk drawers to ward off motion sickness. One afternoon, after fighting back nausea to complete a brief, Holly conceded she’d have to do the same. Knocking on Zuzanna’s door frame, she asked to borrow two dramamine. There’s only a few left in this, Zuzanna said, keep the whole bottle, I have another unopened. Holly said it’d help if she could look out a window, see ground. Zuzanna thought a second then suggested she go to the library on the 76th floor. Until then Holly hadn’t had an occasion to visit. It should be quiet up there, Zuzanna told her, Bobby will be at the desk. Tell him you need a carrel. 

Holly called Fable then Charles to let them know she would be taking an early lunch. To avoid unwanted conversation, she took the stairs. The 76th floor was quiet, unlike the others, empty foyer, elevator doors reflecting the emptiness. Through double glass doors she saw rows of shelves, chairs and tables and no one sitting at them. In the library, behind the desk sat a middle-aged man in glasses photocopying paperwork. Holly asked for a carrel and he lead her to one, but seeing it was facing an interior wall, clarified she was looking for one with a window view. This was no trouble. Bobby led her to a seat and carrel next to glass and left her. No food, no water, the sign at the library entrance had read. So Holly dry-swallowed Zuzanna’s pills and waited. 

The window faced east, an angle of the city she hadn’t enjoyed before. At first glance it offered recombinations of the usual: buildings and more buildings, a small park, cars parked or driving, people walking along in miniature. She let her eyes wander, settle on some figure, follow it a while, switch focus then follow another. She wasn’t quite sure this was meditation but it calmed her. Reminded her of illustrated picture books she poured over as a child, fantastic tableaus depicting creatures and people in a landscape, too many to examine at a glance. As her eyes wandered from one to another, they improvised a narrative, first this happened, then this, but depending on how her eyes scanned the pages, left to right, down to up, just as easily it could’ve happened otherwise. In a few hours she would grab her purse and coat, ride the elevator to ground floor and join them. 

To the right, down a few floors, a few hundred feet from where was sitting, was the rooftop of the Metropolitan Correction Center. Law and order. Here she was sitting, representative of the law, over there, down below, was order. 

On the way to work every morning, she passed the building without noticing—it stood on three points, not four. Triangular in construction and atop it, something she certainly wouldn’t have had opportunity to notice at street-level, a prison yard on its rooftop. A tall triangular wall topped by razor wire, incognito in the heart of the city. 

A bright winter afternoon. Windy but cloudless. 

In the yard orange dots in groups or in pairs. Prisoners. Prisoners in orange jump suits. 

 

Joji's Mission

Out in the wild lands of the material world, no two things genuinely connect by association. But Joji believes the mind can do otherwise, can make it so. Morning coffee steaming at the window. He holds the mug to light. Ghost-wisp-tendrils not unlike hair. But look, he thinks so. So the comparison has been accomplished, leaving behind not a single visible trace. Split second, happened, behind his eyes, like a migraine. These are very private acts, these comparisons. Ephemeral. Unless he wrote them down, and maybe not even then, they’d vanish like drizzles of rain on a pond. Since Joji has a sentimental regard for fragile phenomena, he has long kept a log of such visions in a series of notebooks. Begun on a whim when he was nineteen. 
That was over thirty years ago. There, suddenly, no sooner does this realization occur to him than an image of a young man follows. He’s sitting at a makeshift desk built from cinderblocks and a wooden door. A clay flask rests by his right hand. It arrived by mail earlier that morning, a package sent from a friend in Portland. The flask filled with homemade Kahlua. Joji’s so green about liquor he doesn’t know this is meant to be mixed with milk. He drinks it straight, shocked by the force of the flavor. Scene complete. Time retracts back into present moment. Had he really been that boy once? He had, never to be that boy again. Instead here with coffee in hand imagining himself as a fresh unrealized future. So go the zigzag parlays of the mind, wandering.
Should we mention one of Joji’s current fascinations? He’s very excited this morning. Please remember, from the look of his face none might register the exact dimensions of his excitement. Merely a guy with bare feet propped on a windowsill, hands cradling the coffee. He’s recently come into awareness there’s a radiant being among the human scene, living somewhere in Japan (which island? which city, town? what prefecture?). The radiant being in question is Katsuyoshi Takenaka. A young man, well, more a middle-aged young man who found his calling some time ago after wandering into an artist’s studio for people with disabilities. His radiance is very exclusive in its interests. Over and over and again, it takes pen in hand to meticulously draw networks of skeins on paper. When finished they convey a consummate striking image: towers of various shapes and height, some fully visible, others obscured by clouds of mist. Such busy kinetic excitement looking at these towers of Takenaka! Just a day before, Joji had been unaware they had existed. 
These were not ivory towers. They were seemingly made of chicken wire. There were dozens to choose from, too many, Joji was resigned to appreciate them all equally until he flipped through the small book which had brought him the good news of Katsuyoshi Takenaka’s existence. Yes, it was possible, he could claim a favorite. An outlier among his parade of towers, page after page. Inversion of his established habit, black wires on white paper. Against a solid black background, white lines wriggled and interbraided into a fantastical construction, acrylic paint and marker. This our radiant being titled, as matter-of-fact counterpoint to the farfetched elegance of his vision, Tower Series II. This was too good, this was plenty. More than enough for one day!
As was usually the case, soon as Joji proclaimed he’d had enough, fate would complicate the situation, send him another signal from beyond his quiet window. Toes touching the chill of winter on window glass, the sensation of toes were added to these visions of towers. Then, at random, a song began playing in his head. One he’d first heard earlier that morning lying in bed. As a humble servant to the cosmos, its plentitude of coordinates and reference points, he had long observed the practice of searching out a song he’d never heard before, to listen to while he wrested himself awake. Earlier, before he’d made coffee a reality, he’d chosen one at random, sinning against working musicians everywhere by consorting with an algorithm on his phone. A nearly fourteen minute song from 1986, of all years, an Algerian chanteuse living in Egypt, depicted in digital copy of the album cover resplendent with big 80s hair. Warda Al-Jazairia, stage name “Warda”. The song one of her most famous, “Batwanes Beek”. Took a few minutes to gather and unfold, orchestral strings and cheesy synth and traditional live percussion. Whimsical, mysterious, edging sexiness in a goofy way. This version of Warda had died many, many years before, followed by the woman herself more recently, but she was elegant and alive again, slipping melodic lines through the music. 
Joji rebuilt the towers of Takenaka in his mind as he listened. Here was a new relation, Ms. Warda and Mr. Takenaka. A “Wardanaka” of his own making, hybrid in nature, as he often felt himself most days. Was this the reason he’d been created? Carried to term half a century ago, birthed, raised, pushed through adolescence into adulthood and confused most of the way? To provide occasion for a duet between two figures more than likely unaware of the other and more than likely to remain so. What a privilege to be the one to introduce them! A fresh link between vibrancies.
Was this his mission, Joji wondered. To create conversations between good things of this world, secretly his but also everyone’s? It took so little effort but did not happen naturally. Nature merely evolved such beings, Takenakas and Wardas, so by happenstance he might join them.

WIP [Curses]

Bright secular sunshine, trees nibbled down to their essentials, forest with name unknown to us, we ambled the trail with our backs to the monastery. It was winding and sluiced us like thread through eye of a needle. Through the woods it lead us towards a large commonplace hush where something holy supposedly might be savored. Didn’t happen that way, of course. 
Immersed in the chilly cosmology of a late January afternoon, we breathed and witnessed puffs and vapor trails and we joked these were second-rate spirits leaving our bodies. Could be Mother Nature sensed there were a pair of atheists in her presence, fellow atheists, so she humored us. A mile or two into her interiors she presented us with a neat little shack. We stepped inside to find a ledger book on a rostrum, a cup filled with pens and pencils. Which to select—ink or graphite? Already we were being tested. Opting out of this dualistic trap, we abstained from writing our names, the date, a little hello note or proclamation. 
Didn’t stop us though from reading the ledger’s recent or more ancient history: a long list of people offering petitions to some hypothetical totalizing intelligence that cared about their worries and hardships. One entry was greedy, ran several pages, handwriting switching from tight cursive to LARGE BOLD BLOCK LETTERS under the grips of SOME STRONG EMOTION. The message that suffered under such penmanship was bitter, angry, generous with condemnations of various impious minorities. Per usual homosexuals were singled out as particularly deserving of damnation. In one vivid passage were described as OPEN SORES upon the FACES of ANGELS. These were weeping, but not with sorrow. With offensive putrescence, so goddamn them.
Might’ve been enough to sour the day but some joker had lightened the pages with doodles of penises. From urethras of a few were speech bubbles filled with silly comments: “LIGHTEN UP, FRANCES!”, “ME SO HOLY”. The talking penises of Gethsemane, we called them. To honor the obscurity of the moment, we each took a pen and drew one, urethra #1 upcurled into a toothy smile, phallus #2 with little arm and hand from which it blew many friendly kisses. There, done. Closing the ledger, we left the shack and afternoon to disguise these signifiant changes we had made to the universe. It was good. 

*

I’m reminded here of another. This from a friend who, though he prided himself a rationalist, couldn’t sever his helpless subservience to superstition. 
A month after their wedding, he and his young wife had purchased a house. Call it a year of gifts: first the wedding, then the house. Several people from his home country gifted them twice, burying them under an embarrassment of well-wishing. An acquaintance of one of his aunts, a woman who had on two occasions cut his hair as a worker in his mother’s salon, had presented them with a large potted plant. This he placed in the corner of their new living room. Once a week either he or his wife watered it until its long spiky fronds splayed and grew. A year passed, another. Three years passed, four. In its corner the plant grew large enough to become a fifth member of the family, along with two cats that occasionally bothered it. 
One summer afternoon on a whim he and his wife felt the itch to rearrange furniture. By then their honeymoon was long past and they recognized the need for a refresh of surroundings. Paintings were moved then chairs were, the couch, the bookshelf. To make way for a floor lamp, they shimmied the plant from its corner and in the effort it toppled over, spilled wholesale—dirt, roots, and all—across the floor. 
Working to pull it back together before righting it, they noticed something odd clatter from the pot. A long rusty nail with lengths of human hair wrapped around it. 
The wife was bewildered but amused, the husband paled and mock-spat between forked fingers. 
What was that? she asked. 
Protection against The Evil Eye, he told her. 
For in his home country this was a gesture of ill will, a curse, and hidden as such could only mean the woman who’d gifted them the plant had wished harm upon them. 
But why, the wife asked. She seemed so nice, genuinely happy for us. 
Genuinely shaken, he paused again to fork the fingers of a hand, pointed to the floor before him, spat dryly between the horns. 
The woman still lived in their city, he noted, still visited his mother’s salon on occasion. 
Was it that she was not hired on as a stylist, years ago, by her mother?
It hadn’t been personal. Her mother couldn’t afford to offer a chair and styling station to just anyone? There were so many younger women with beautician certificates, who brought new clientele into the salon. 
Should they tell his mother, his wife asked. 
Never, he told her, because it’s impossible to know whose hair this is, or how it’d been obtained. 
Instead they took the hair and nail into the furthest corner of the back yard and buried it. The tree beneath which they buried it did not die. But in the following years it did not flourish much either.

*

Game of Spirits

An old beginning, look up at what you’re rising to meet, what’s falling to enfold you. As all existing diaries in the world, even those yet to be written, are tossed in a wood chipper. Shreds flurry into the air and flutter like snow. Deja vu, you’ve seen this before. Where have you seen it? Everyone’s internal monologues copied onto very private paper then destroyed without a pause for sentiment. Mixing on the high winds, a cloud imitating old school Biblical locusts. It doesn’t come to ravage crops or bother the silence of some rural heaven; rather it floats down softly, impossible to read now, in this new form. These were once worries, desires, complaints, paranoiac ramblings. So diverse were their beliefs and concerns it could be said the only credible similarity that joined them was their fealty to literacy, that a child had been taught to have an internal life through learning how to read and write. Watch how easily that tradition can be churned into blizzard, a flotsam that sputters from the exit-maw of a thresher. 

You’re thinking yes, this is the way to enter. This is the beginning. A confusion of expired miracles rendered unto compost or mulch.

It’s the same cold lesson returning to be unlearned so it can become human again. No spirit is future-proof, for it’s doomed to be blessed a child of flesh. Take a bow. Honor the co-authoring of quiet fate with this strange form you were conjured from. It has grown a few gray hairs. Skin has begun to sag at its throat. Every morning it wakes a little more haggard. But the spirit within! It fights to resist the early onset of wisdom. Hold on, hold out, don’t let acceptance of your condition catch you until your final head lays to rest on its final pillow. Defeated into static wisdom at last, one second before the heart stops and brain dims to necrotic matter. 

Everyone loves a beginning and resists an end, unless, that is, the going has been terrible. Wandering through a wilderness of identities, confused to find they all fit to one degree or another, yet none quite so perfectly as none at all. You, for example. About you it could be said: I hid you in my mind and there, at my leisure, casually grew you. Ambidextrous in referential power, you could be singular or plural, a little more singular or even less so, a little more than just one of you, two, four, a dozen. Having grown from the whereabouts and whoabouts of my garden mind, you were generous with approximation: a you for the few and a you for the many, a you for the friendless and singularly alone. I thought and felt you out into the world in many directions, nothing common to your many origins except that you were driven subtly from a self that asked no tracks be left behind to be followed. “All roads lead away from simplicity,” a foolish sage might say of this. Gladly, then, you branched out without need of paths worn by predecessors. You were original in that you were commonplace, unaware of your complexity, that you advanced at each step through a life that relieved me of a past. I watched you go, relieved of having to track your progress into the known, proud as a man relieved of fatherhood, its demands and subtle anxieties. Here I wait, the prodigal father, never to return asking forgiveness of daughters or sons. Epistemological humility, how to describe it, it tastes like, like…freshly chewed raspberries. Soft parts, sweet flesh, mixed with hard tiny kernels, seeds. Tart. Almost too much so. 

Daydreaming while locked in the grips of headache. What it feels like. Figures wandering through perpetual inferno or ambient heart-attack, braiding new lives through interaction, friends, lovers, competitors, enemies sworn and unsworn. You are each of these yet relieved of having to be all of them together. As it stands, that’s my role. How to guide these many lives without becoming more than myself? All praise forgetfulness. Out of sight, out of mind, out of myself. Squint the eyes, rub the temples. Picture wildly hypothetical but specific freedoms beyond the blast circumference of this brain’s current migraine. I was this life, lives, this person breaking perpetually down into more and more persons. You. You and more you. Dispersed across every corner of the earth armed with a loneliness that can’t be solved except by rejoining with this maker forever-in-hiding who imagines them. A mere mortal who lives to grow and lose his hair.