Pavement, hardened by countless days of traffic, clicks beneath us as we walk the vacant streets. The sound is sharp and clean in the night air, snapping from our feet and skidding across the road like a rock across the surface of a still lake.
The heavy brown leather of my boots squeak with the strain as we push up-hill, our eyes struggle to adjust to approaching headlights before they pass, and we slip again into darkness. I have little to say; my mind is weighing heavily on me this evening, so I let you speak. I’m just happy to be outside and alone.
You dance excited, your feet tapping rhythm across the road-- giving voice to your music, you croon and moan, drawing a quivering line to a freedom of compromise.
“They find a kind of freedom of their own”, you slide like a trombone through your idea, raging and stomping with the music of what you’ve seen. “They escape in their own small way, a small personal victory. They just don’t let it take that essential part of them”. You soar into a blaze, your rhythm pounding its beat off the walls of the houses, rattling the windows of cars as they pass us by.
Our eyes turn, adjusting to the shutter of headlights as they pass by in waves.
“Freedom can only be complete, by its nature;” now I speak, mellow, building to a fiery ember, purring and whispering with exhausted fervor. “It can’t live in compromise or limitation. Limited freedom is an oxymoron, it ceases to be ‘freedom,’” lashing the air with my fingers, I build and kick and twist, but this night had taken my power.
“You are all or nothing. You look for the path that is least safe, and you push ahead. Me, I always want to follow safety.” You speak simply, and the words whisper around us like a wind; tugging at our clothes, and hinting at the bodies beneath.
We walk on, the stillness of night absorbing our music, and wrapping us tight in her quiet arms. The cold bites through my thin sweater, but I don’t wish to be back with the others.
I’ve no place in the crowd- I’ve no place in the world. My uncompromised freedom has no place- is not valued, in today’s world. I wander voiceless the peripheries of a time made for others.
The ghosts of weakness and fear muscle my shoulders and whisper that this is stubbornness, pride, that this is the idle ranting of unproductive childishness.
We round the final corner and near our starting-place and destination; recognizing a noisy fountain, bubbling and laughing alone in the darkness.
Pushing aside the bodies crowding the door, we make our way inside, and I again felt alone. Soundlessly, I move to a quiet corner- you can disappear if you want, step into an optical worm-hole, light waves bend around you, allowing your unseen presence. It appears like rippling heat waves down a distant asphalt road in the July sun, marking the disturbance. I melt into the waves, and the world keeps turning, society keeps working, and I can just watch. The room turns, and the people turn and the world turns, so drink up because tomorrow the sun turns round the edge of the world and its back to work.
I can feel the presence of a human being in my worm-hole. Melting into the wave beside me, she takes my hand in hers, and we watch the world turn; watch the sun crawl through the sky on all fours, watch the people rise, scrape and die- always turning.
She leans into my side, and I feel her solid against me, soft and warm; her chestnut hair falls over the brightest blue eyes. A spirit of energy and life, imperfect—perfect.
She is with me in the wave of my worm-hole, a presence, a form to hold and feel, but exists without presence, without shape, outside it.
A ghost of woman.
I sometimes feel a richer, fuller presence, one without imperfection; a shapeless ideal that haunts my consciousness, sliding her slender hand across my back, resting a ghostly head on my shoulder. I smell her hair, feel her presence, feel her dissolve into ghostly wisps of pure idea. Cold, calm, dispassionate, she brushes against my side and settles against me.
Pressed tight to my side, I am enveloped by her energy.
Haunted by the spectre of absolute possibility, I am haunted by freedom.
I am left to lust after her, while I feel her dance about me like smoke playing in the wind.
I leave my quiet worm-hole, and feel the pressure of her hand still on mine, and the force of her perfect blue eyes on my heart. Glass litters the floor, shining cool and sharp in the buttery light. Glittering with the cold, quiet dispassion of freedom, daring us to test inevitability.
Slipping into my shoes, you join me by the door, and we push into the cold.
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2 comments:
The first time that I read this post a while ago I thought that it was merely a brilliantly captured visceral experience of smokin' da cheeba and then experiencing the city. Although elements of it certainly encompase that sort of adventure, I have reread this piece and decided that it is much more. Firstly it need not have anything to do with drugs. Secondly, it is actually quite a comprehensive piece of philosophy, but philosophy in the flesh. You are embodying ideas and also creating a character by voicing these complaints to the world, self-doubt (ie your admission of possible immaturity, and descriptions of something that seem very much like god or maybe a woman, or both...I've lost my train of though, but isn't that the problem. First thought good thought, if you keep producing pieces like this and then find the contenuity and structure which can weave them all together you'll have yourself a story that people will be able to understand and care to read.
Yes. I think that was why I kept prodding you to read it again, to study it with me. The way you spoke about it- you captured the visceral experiece of it, but missed the underlying....I don;t think there is a word that properly encompasses what i need to say with that word.
To create a metaphor, you watched my lips move, observed the movement and stretch and gleam of the physical, but missed what I was saying.
I guess all it took was re-reading it after all.
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