23.6. So

And so why do we mend, why do we repair and renew and re-stitch every thread tugged a little here, a little there, a little bit in the direction of that town in which the boy with the grand blue eyes promised he would never stay? And so he left and returned, yes returned -- because don't we always have a lovely lot of chains binding us to some certain ground? Binding us to a particular moment in a nostalgia-wrought year; the same year we stopped eating or fell in love with people we know so well do not exist. Or watched a film in Spanish and understood it all, my God. Or your god or their god or all our gods, shall we collect them altogether like token-beauties and marvel in what we cannot comprehend?... I think it sounds wonderful. I think it all sounds so wonderful.

So many broken people. So many broken people who do not need remedies. No, I think they look quite good ruined and nomadic. Fleeting, drifting presences that will oblige you to think and to feel and, later, perhaps, to follow them and stick feathers in your hair as well. What a handsome cycle. What a perfect series, string of hands and hearts and urgent fingers reaching for scenes and backdrops they cannot claim as theirs. Someday, though. Someday when our vision twists monochromatic, when our leather ankle boots and inset ideas become less significant, then it will all become more significant. The little things, I mean. I suppose, though, that these little things are unbearably relative. My Fleet Foxes poster for instance: I would hold and grip that thing to its core in the face of a lava sea biting at my shins and wrists, and you may just as well pitch it in the dumpster resting on the corner of your street. So don’t throw things out. And if you do, if you must, do not crumple them, at least, so someone else may find and keep and adore these lovely, lonely things as well. Even if everything may not belong somewhere, it certainly fits in somewhere.

But this cannot be one grandiose puzzle. And so no one knows this but me. But it’s essentially all I do know. And if I turn out to be incorrect, if it turns out that the great mystery of the world is actually everyone finding the spaces and pauses where they belong, if it turns out that we are always tumbling and tripping over ourselves attempting to locate all of this, well then I apologize. It would not be my first misstep. But I think, yes I do believe the delusions we all watch and chase are not a result of our quick-tempered trying. The puzzle. Maybe we created it all on our own. Our first invention, innovation -- goodness, aren’t you proud? Aren’t you so very proud? It is also the first thing to damage us. To mar us a tiny, achy little bit. I don’t know why and I don’t particularly even know how, only that everyone, vaguely, feels as if they are not supposed to be where they are at some point in their lives. Myself included (still naïve and still in high school, my God). And so we run and so we escape and so we hurt and lie and pretend, somewhat, and then we end up somewhere different. Different, like we needed. And then, in due time, likely after years have passed and flashed and wasted in our palms, we figure out that below the lofty tree outside our glassy plastic ventana is a brilliant place to think. Is a brilliant place to learn our own story. Is a brilliant piece of a brilliant world in a brilliant city meant for another, brilliant being whose past and whose possibilities we have sadly, terribly been clinging onto.

And so maybe we leave. Maybe we stay. And so maybe that wasn’t the purpose after all, really. But hey, I think possibly I’m just making all this up. What do I know, what expertise have I gathered on the subject; spellbound, essentially, in the same town for my whole life, writing and going to classes -- surely there are better people to listen to. I am hypocritical and I am agonizingly insecure and I am pretentious about certain things, I imagine. And even so I can assure you that your doctor, therapist, professor, lifelong friend, colleague, dentist and idol all clutch for their lives onto bias and lies and put in the forefront, list at the top of their priorities a longing for more and a wish to maintain themselves above all else. As it should be, perhaps. But not too much so. Never too much so.

And when it does get so, when you begin to notice a lack of whatever really needs to be there, well then good for you. Just notice it. Recognize it and understand it and move on with your own storyline. Or maybe the writer will grow bored, and you too shall grow bored and pinched and feeble: scrambling to put together words and phrases and pages of things you shouldn’t have to plan. And if our destinies truly are pre-determined, well then please do not read ahead. Please just leave it all in this time and moment, helpless, hopeless, hurried mess that you are -- keep it as is. I think lovely Vonnegut said it best, yes I do think it was him and I do think you’d do well to listen: “So it goes.”