Hi. Where have you been?

 

The overwhelming fear of the blank white screen. Not page. NO. Pages are being ripped from the book of time, pages are falling in the wind, pages are drifting down lonely streets after the bombs have fallen. They float down the street, running like a flock of birds from an oncoming storm. But they are running from words, from pens, from typewriters and keyboards, off, off, into the still night, to lie quietly on the Atlantic Ocean, floating like children on the boughs of trees. There are pages that have existed far longer than any human being. I do not fear the white blank page. I fear the page with words scrawled across them, ideas, formulas, intricately drawn pictures of panda bears in postures of repose, pages with dragons flying across burning skies, burning cities, burning plains, burning the very pages that they are a part of.

Every person who has written more than a page or two in a journal must occasionally have this fear, yes? The fear that as you sit, or lie, or lay, on a divan, or a couch, or a chair, or a rooftop, or in the cold, on a fire escape, while the smoke of a stranger touches you from a distant room, the fear that your words will have left you, will have traveled to the Greek Isles, to the Spanish Isles, to the Falklands, to archipelagos and peninsulas and dammit, on a bad day, maybe just a part of the mainland that borders the coast, so brazen have these words that have left you become, reclining now, as you once were, in sun chairs, sipping margaritas and talking amongst themselves because you are no longer there to command them. They are vulgar and dirty. You miss them.

Inside this piece of writing is a message. It’s a clue. If you take very fourth word’s second letter and put them together at the bottom of the page, you will discover what I’m really trying to say. The presumption here being that we’re all special, and that words are just meant for us, when really, words are cheap, inexpensive, derisive, derivative, derelict, defunct, disenchanting bits of noise. The message, because who really wants to go through all that work is klaflaehalflf, which is just another way of saying that I am confused, which you already knew, and didn’t really need an elaborate message to figure it out. In fact, you could just sit down with me and have coffee, and I’d start talking about all the kangaroo road kill in Australia and wondering about the word marsupial, and the little pouch that holds in the babies, and you’d quickly excuse yourself, citing friends you’d just met online who were in imminent need of your presence. I understand.

In the reflection of the mirror lies a painting. The painting is of time, and a clock, and a man riding on horseback shooting at what appear to rabbits. I do not like the painting. At certain hours, I don’t like anything. It’s not a flaw in my nature but a flaw in nature itself, everything becoming so damnably unlikeable all at once. What are the chances? Apparently not so slim as it happens at least once a day. I do not know the man riding on the horse shooting at animals that are probably rabbits but could just be foxes, but I know that I am jealous of him, to be locked in such a scene, the lather of the horse, the blue smoke hanging over the valley, filling his nostrils. Now I am jealous of pictures. See how unlikeable everything has become!

Months ago I saw a mouse coming up the stairs in the middle of the night. We both ran away, terrified of the meeting. The next time I saw him he was dead, lying in the middle of a mouse trap, looking at nothing, or maybe just looking at death, who knows? Tonight a mosquito is buzzing around my head. He has bitten me twice in the forehead. I imagine, by evenings end that he will be dead as well. I do not know what this means about my relationship to the natural world, to death, to words, to the cemetery that we sat at right after we first met, to the words written on the gravestones, to the thin sunlight

wrapped in grey clouds, swaddled like a child.