21

It's a birthday today. One of my lost boys. At this point I have no emotion. Oh, I have emotion. Some things I feel perfectly free and right to lie about. Sometimes it's the only way I can approach the truth. This, for example. I never said it was true. It's lies. I already told you I lie about these things. Did you think I was lying? Don't pretend you're confused. Emotions aren't supposed to make sense.

Sometimes I think I could fly. Sometimes I think parts of my body could be cut off and regrow. There is someone living behind my face that I glimpse sometimes in the tension of my cheekbones. I see milky pale auras around people. I see the grain of reality like a photograph on stippled paper. I feel light falling on my eyes like raindrops splashing into puddles. Sometimes late at night as I lie in bed I hold my breath for hours and breathe through my skin. If I breathe too deeply my fingers tingle with heat. I avoid eye contact because the intimacy is too intense. I think I was ordained for greatness and have betrayed my destiny. I think I was attacked as an infant and have never recovered. I think that if I had a former life, it was I who hammered the nails into Christ's wrists.

I think atheists are right in their incomprehension of purpose and meaning. I have a gift of words and a clarity of thought, and these please me but give me no peace. I have a destructiveness that sees every misfortune as a deserved punishment. I have never felt sympathy without an accompanying urge for vengeance.

If all or any of this is true, what am I to think of the love I have given like lava pouring into the sea? We are what we do. Volcanoes pour out melted rock. Otherwise, dormant or dead. No matter that the rock cools. The infinite universe is cold. Yet it ends in fire.

If I weren't so rational I would act on the violence in my soul and think it right and good. But I am resigned to the fact that there is no justice. I think I am. I'd like to know if there is some way to say goodbye, finally, though. I wish there were some single, simple, symbolic thing to say and be done at long last with it. Goodbye, Joey. But there isn't. Is there?

I feel something now. It's not much. How sharp can it be after so long? The eternal boot smashing a face. An eternal knife plunging into a heart, or an infinite series of hearts. The mountain of God is a pyramid of death, Aztec cosmos Milky Way as a river hot as lava, red as blood. They are right to find no meaning. Not because there is no meaning, but because it's just too painful to see that far. That far and no further. Eye contact with God. It's too intimate. We can't help but feel. It must be a good thing.

But I don't feel much. I know it's a mistake. But look at what I'd feel, if I did. I can't face it alone, is all. Just another way that I've forsaken my destiny. What, I owe you an apology? You should be more sympathetic.


J