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sublingua | |||||
| The heart with a mind of its own.(Be present.) | The mind with a heart of its own.(It's past.) | The dream that is your waking life.(Go there now.) | |||
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part VI: walk away from dreams
dear heart, in the interest of keeping up with the reams and reams of supplementary reading material that is being handed out by my dear english instructor, i am going to turn this into a frame narrative ala heart of darkness and ethan frome. i plan to accomplish this by prefacing the following with a warning that it was written in the darkest of the dark days--that is, when it seemed as though my heart was really not a fist-sized organ whose sole purpose is to pump blood through my useless body, but was instead a kind of bomb whose quiet ticking, ignored by my brain, only existed to hint at destructive possibility. yes, i've been reading edith wharton. what's it to you? (besides a lot of really overwrought prose). the letter: dearest, well, i'm sorry about the whole, you know, sleeping thing when you called back last night. i'm perfectly aware that it was probably due to the exhaustion that comes with trying to hold a conversation about various things without revealing what those things are, either explicitly or implicitly. and it's not like living with a child, i've found, where one can just sort of spell everything out. turns out that it's more like one finds that one is spelling everything out anyway, despite trying to say nothing and everything. so, if you go back and read that last paragraph, it is abundantly clear what i am talking about, despite the fact that i tried to make it as cryptic as possible. and i find that the trend towards cryptic is making my brain not a little twisted. i wonder if faulkner ever felt that way. i mean, he was a genius and a drunkard, and i'm just a woman wrestling with morality, but there are the inevitable comparisons to be drawn from this. the lessons all have the same objectives, even if they don't resemble one another in content. it's really hard to stop once you get started, verdad? (which would be the caption on this chapter in my life if my life were a thing being lived in chapters and that required captions.) the other option, i think, would have to be: be careful what you wish for. you may know that i'm a one for flinging wishes about willy-nilly, so i think that the universe long ago stopped listening to what comes out of my mouth. sadly, this meant that it started listening to what is coming out of my heart. and my heart, apparently, completely independently of my brain, has been beating out some distress signal in morse code. there has been this steady "i want. i need. i want" chant. i'm not trying to flatter myself that this has been answered, but i think that the option having presented itself speaks for itself. and now all that's left to decide is: now what? now what? if this were a dream, the level of discomfort that i've been feeling would have meant that i would have woken myself up out of it long ago. if it were a dream. we can walk away from dreams. (i almost heard that last sentence as i typed it. almost. so let's try it again:) we can walk away from dreams. (but do we want to walk away from them?) later: so i just spent the afternoon with the neo-stephen, who. that's all i'm going to say about him from now on: "the neo-stephen who." jeez. who am i kidding? not you certainly. we went for vietnamese food, sadly, but this was only after trying to go to Bangkok Cafe and Ginger Thai. Turns out he also loves sushi--although the way i found this out was by his story about how he and his x used to go for sushi all the time. yes, i realize how patently absurd it is for me, in this situation, to be annoyed at the tales of the x. anyway, to make matters worse, her name is sublingua, and she is apparently one of those women who likes to get a boy and keep the boy for a while and then break up with the boy and then keep the boy on one of those horrible hooks that fishermen keep fish that they've caught--you know, the ones that go through the gills and then are lowered into the water again so that the fish stays fresh/alive until it can be finally killed. and that sounds a lot more grotesque than his situation with the ex-sub, but there it is. my view. in regards to the xsub also, i'm having to remind myself it is entirely possible (though not entirely clear) that perhaps my heart is just the scratch paper upon which he is working out the problem of his continuing attachment to her. if that's the case, then i'm really, really going to feel stupid at some point in the not too distant future. not like now, but really stupid. neither of us is looking at it too closely or too clearly because it might just vanish if we notice that it's just a shade of a relationship. if we name it, it will become more dangerous than it already is maybe? or maybe it will diffuse it. in any case, there are so many ghosts here that i don't know which are the real ghosts and which are the ghosts that my head is putting in there. for example, today there was the cryptic smile and the admission that he couldn't sleep last night until he had exhausted himself with worry. worry about what? he won't say. this is the man who has told me everything, every sexual exploit, every childhood tale he can remember, every book he ever loved. suddenly he is worried. and i'm supposed to read what into this? yesterday, it was the fact that it was too early for him to "confess" to me. confess what? in truth, i already know, but, see above in re: xsub. yesterday, i asked him to show me his favorite place on campus. we went down into the stacks of zimmerman library. we played that game of pull a book at random off the shelf and read your fortune. i read from a book called "imagery and symbolism" about buddhist monks who are able to live in the moment and how the buddha could always recognize when this was happening. he read from a book by--god, what was his name? the neo-stephen pegged him right away as quote one of the founders of american pragmatism end quote--i can't remember. the passage was about women and perfume, and how one could read the kind of woman from her kind of perfume. you know. pragmatism. of course, i was wearing the egyptian musk, which i just love--but there was no mention of what kind of woman this made me. what kind of woman does this make me? when i think in terms of happiness, i don't expect for it to be something that applies to me. i expect to work hard. i don't expect too many rewards--or, if i do, i keep the expectation of them in my heart for the most part. i keep them as close to me as i can. so, am i looking at this as a reward for what i have been through? this thinking is so fucked. i'm trying to engage in right-thinking, but my brain is running at cross-purposes to my heart. i'm trying to stay in the moment, yes? but staying in the moment means that-- staying in the moment, when one is american, almost always seems to mean that there is some useless desire to be met. it tends to mean instant gratification. it tends to mean trading what we want most for what we want at the moment. but i've lost sight of what i want most. i've not been able to remember for the last couple of weeks. [end transmission] and many days and thoughts later: well, that's the end of what i knew--or wrote--just after our conversation. i've spent the last several days trying to steer the neo-stephen dilemma hard to the left, towards friendship (this following a conversation in which neither of us admitted anything but i still managed to say that our being in love was impossible because we didn't really know each other at all (and the whole time i was saying it, my heart was trying desperately to smash open the bars of its cage)). i don't know how you did it, my dear. all i want to do is talk about neo-stephen, and you, you seemed so able, in the dark days of stephen, to hold your cards close to your chest. i know then that i often responded with such a "what, beret boy? who are you trying to kid?!" attitude or worse, but i guess all that chewing away at one's heart takes time and effort. i guess. who am i kidding? this i know. i suppose that bowling alley bathroom mirrors are just as good at understanding the drunken unburdening of souls as most people are. so that's a frame narrative. really, though, i feel like i'm cheating you, what with most frame narratives having a narrator whose distance from the subject allows for some kind of insight into the events which have/had transpired. someday, we shall not speak of this again. see you in a bit-- sublingua
More lies:
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