I lifted my chopsticks up, and the noodles curled and yawned, meeting the cold air of life, curling and stretching and dripping soup. I could see them as individual strands that intertwined, shifting and changing, always dripping residue.
She didn't call me, and thoughts of possible scenarios played themselves in my mind and branched off into a million conclusions, so I decided to leave her alone. To touch her would be to transfer these that were running in my body, to confuse and to shock and to drag down. The chopsticks would slip and noodles would fall into the ramen with a dead 'slup', thrown back and limp with an IV catheter, no longer useful.
I argued for two hours yesterday on the phone, and it seems that I couldn't say what I could say, because the phone said that I was wrong, and after that was a constant tail-chasing argument. I flopped spastically on my bed and stared at the ceiling light, which had small bugs running around it like horses around a circular race track. Some of the horses were dead, and had been collected in the middle of the track. They were the sacrifices, the dead in the pyre, burning high, flickering long into the night.
I was walking and thinking, feeling this impossible singularity in my veins and wondering how everything would turn out, like the individual victims after a spaghetti-meatball car crash. Separated, amputated, deconstructed, threads of lives running together into giant knots then branching off again. Right then, a wave of wind blew my hair upwards and out and my eyes opened, and then I was there. It was roaring past, and because of that, it was alright.
I've been listening to the same playlist for about a month now. All the other songs in my collection yelling to be let out. I want to say what I want to say, and I was shoved back by glassy-smooth arguments that said "no" in a firm and authorative tone that landed squarely on my shoulders like the sudden weight of a bench press. Bland agreeability, and knowing for the sake of knowing? I like depth. I like depth, as in the sweet pockets of chocolate fudge secreted in the depth of an expensive and heavy sundae. I like clear pools than deep and murky ones, though. The clear ones are rare. Everybody likes triple-fudge and double-butterscotch sundaes.
There are always leaves outside my window, and in the autumn they will turn red and orange and brown. My window will turn red and orange and brown. My view will turn red, orange, and brown, bringing with it bloodshot eyes that anger at nothing, punching fluid waters into choppy waves that overturn fishermen and waves and two twin towers and David Blaine and all the other controversial hot new interesting passionate shocking topics in that other world. It's been a while since I've watched TV, so it's been a while since I've noticed. It's been a while since I've talked with someone who knew how to talk. I told that friend that "people don't know how to talk" and he asked, "Articulation?" I said "not in words" and he said "In metaphors?" I said "not using vocal chords" and then he asked "Hand gestures?"
People knew how to talk, at least then, but now everything is being dumbed down over coats of varnish and water-proof DuPont textiles. The sky is falling down, and we are all dying, and last week and the year before that we used to run uphill both ways and the white snow was so thick that your knees stuck in and life was so rich and hard that you actually had to spoon it up with your palms in order to drink it. Firm and concrete things are disappearing, and I'm finding that the ground is slipping underneath, waving and blending like psycheadelic nauseating hallucinations, changing, changing, gray, grey. Slipping like icicles through gloved fingers.
People knew how to talk, at least then, when friends were friends and enemies were enemies, when black was dark and white was bright, when the mix of horrid gray didn't blur everything into an uncertain obligation that had to be done under the excuse of prevention. "I don't 'love' but I 'like', I don't 'hate' but I 'dislike'". I Might Not Like Him But I Don't, It's Just So-So..
But then again, I think, hasn't it always been this way?