Thu, 19 May 2005

circling over rowboats (good works IV)
“This bed is cursed!” she proclaimed, filled with finality, obviously the start of a course of action which would end in some blessed bed where nothing but sweet dreams and orgasms would find her, and it would be my mission, as her stooge, to provide menial labor and comic relief over the course of this plan’s execution, and at fruition I would wisecrack and fawn and see myself out as the came to claim his just desserts. “Yes!” I agreed, “most certainly cursed! Else why so much gone wrong here, so little sleep and satisfaction and nothing but aches and tears and insomnia?”

She stared at me, and smiled a little, which she does when she suspects I’m cracking wise at her expense, like when I told her that the Mayans invented the first automobile. “You laugh now, monkey-boy! After I get this new bed, everything will change forever! Believe it, hot rod!”

The binding-lines of our friendship primarily consist of ridiculous notions that we can fundamentally change the course of our lives through last-minute drastic actions, often supersaturated with drama, and so while I was vaguely skeptical I was, at heart, a True Believer, and that belief is the thing outside parties mistake for crushery. Certainly there’s a bit of that, indulged during stints of housesitting when I will sleep in this new blessed bed and trick myself into believing I could change enough to become someone else entirely, someone authentic in all the affectations she swoons for, someone smart and ignorant in the proper balance, and more than anything, someone entirely new to her, someone whose heart was still a black box she hadn’t yet cracked open, because (as she would tell me sometimes, trying to convince herself through repetition and giddy inflection) history cancels the possibility for perfection, leaving only the settling and pretending and disappointments that all the relationships all our friends were caught within were based on. I would nod at this, mock-sagely, and spout off some tenent of True Belief, like perfection was possible within our lifetimes.

Mockery is the soul’s way of acclimating itself to what it will one day become, learning the muscle memory through the positive reinforcement of laughter and disbelief, until you start to suspect you’re adapting yourself to the things that were once so funny, until you stop suspecting it at all, until it is what you are. This is easy to see among the people I know, once practically built from laughing at the sad cliches of the world that came before us, and so it was with her and I and True Belief, still falling into exaggerated preacher voices, fake-pompous and stretching the vowels, as we said things we wanted to be true, that we learned to believe might be true, that we were still young, and could still change, having drawn over our memories of how hollow and predetermined everything felt when we were actually young, how easily we fell for every stupid lie, how enamored we were of suffering and loss. In that sense, we have not changed at all.

“I believe! I believe everything!” I laughed, and kicked the old bed in defiance of its curse. “We will go downtown and will not leave until we find the perfect bed, and we will have it blessed by professionals with glass eyes and velvet robes that smell of cabbage and rum!”

“And cutie-pie witches from the community college who will toast this new bed with offerings of cheap wine and panties!”, she said.

And we laughed, and believed, at least for a little while.
(12:23.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #