Nagasaki

I've inadvertently abandon my blog as of late while trying my hand at short fiction. Today is an epitomical blog day.

Time feels like a painting. From one angle, it gives the illusion of great depth. I've become engrossed in its detail, transcended by its expansive terrain- not ending, but disappearing at the horizon. It is sustaining. It is eternal. Turn the painting on its side and it is thin canvas or thinner paper. Finite, fragile, purposeless, chaotic. Invisible. This is the dichotomy of how time manifests for me in this season.

I am listening to music with legato phrases and atmospheric support. It helps me to feel like I'm enveloped in water. The oscillating current pushes me with its deliberate energy, the rough surface distorting the night sky; I cannot fix upon the north star. Every song stretches and suspends me in the deep freeze of aether. Every song implodes me into my densest form inside of its vacuum. When the song is over, it feels as though it lasted one blink of the eye. My lashes, like a venus flytrap, had closed around the music for nourishment, only to open in wait for the next drop of manna.

As the heaviness of the flu sets in after the first sneeze, worry is upon us. The unwelcome schema of recovery is awoken in my brain. I hate that I know just what to do. I hate that I know what to expect. I hate that there are variables. Will the let downs be as great this time, or will they take advantage of this chance at redemption? Will we be forced to humor ironic offenses that were delivered as attempts to encourage? Will we again have to coddle emotional deficiencies so they won't be scared away?

Around this time tomorrow, a surgeon will call me out of a waiting room. I trust that the news will be good... well, as good as it can be. As good as it can be means that I will walk into a sterile room and greet my wife- somewhere between sedation and consciousness. She will not remember this time- by the grace of God, she will not remember this time. Half of her head wrapped in bandages- the other half, black and blue. One eye swollen shut, the other obscured by gauze. Machines that resemble the cockpit of a 1950's space ship- all attached to her. All beeping incessantly. All towering over us like skyscrapers in a foreign city- hiding us in shadows, mocking our helplessness.

I chose her in health. I keep her in sickness. I love her eternally.

Yesterday, I took in her brilliant face, I absorbed her witty insults, I held her petite frame. I don't ever need to be reminded of how amazing my wife is, but it is so wonderful to experience her. There's a reason stories end when the guy and the girl finally get together; everything after happily ever after is inconsequential. We are still and will always be as one flesh, but the happily will be interrupted. Though the interruption feels like carrying an enormous boulder on my back, up the side of a volcano in an attempt to clog its mouth to spare the village below.

I am currently still in an emotional limbo. I'm not so much in the mood for designing a conclusion.

the first. the last.

the apparition
of ever dimming hopes

the pins and needles
in a leg that's gone numb

the infinite space
that the universe vies to fill

the white noise
drowning out what i can't unhear

the rock
that i shatter on; the hands that let go

a path
like a funnel. we all stand in its mouth.
single file at its end.

Call Me! ...ishmeal

I'm currently researching the brief, but very significant friendship between Herman Melville and Nathanial Hawthorne. Though many authors throughout history have been friends or acquaintances with their contemporaries, this one was uniquely significant.

Their friendship was abnormally intimate (no, not like that) as Melville claimed that finally he had "found the soul mate for whom I have been yearning." This was for a number of reasons: their views on the nature of man, their love of the sea, and the fact that they had both lost their fathers at a young age are points of particular relevance.

Their friendship lasted a meager two years, but in that time, they collectively composed five of their most important works, including The Scarlet Letter and Moby Dick. There is very convincing evidence that these writings being accomplished at the same time as their friendship was NOT a coincidence.

To Melville and Hawthorne! Arguably the greatest bromance in all of literature.

2/1/11

"Answers are framework. Good or bad, they show us where our feet will go and when. But bafflement- a free fall through clouds that are conspiring with fog- it is a chute that never opens."