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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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The Demon Whose Prayers Were Answered
�I would often catch friends of the family looking at me with a worried or puzzled expression. My audience was getting more and more difficult. I had to exert myself. I overplayed and sounded false. ..� �Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words (1964)
While looking for photographs of Robert recently, I found a journal from �96. It was a reminder to me of how long my heart had been dead. Max, x, and I were on a road trip. We were on our way to Los Angeles via Las Vegas. It was a curious trip because it was the first time I had ever left home and felt nothing. (Normally, leaving knocks me out of the rut I tend to get into at home. I like to travel because everything feels so different. Paper seems whiter. Doorknobs take on new meanings. The world gets washed clean and you actually have the chance to see something for what it is, not for what the tapes in your head tell you it is and always has been and always will be.) On the trip, I found myself taking pictures of empty motel rooms and public bathrooms and blurred pictures of Vegas by night. I took pictures of the inside of the anonymous rental car and of gas stations in towns whose names I can�t recall. From the balcony of Ethan�s apartment, I took a roll of photographs of a neighborhood that I will never see again. And nothing touched me on that trip. Nothing. I was in love with Ethan�or thought I was at one time. I spoke for hours on the phone with him. I played games with him. I didn�t love him. I wanted some distraction. I wanted someone to want me. I don�t know if he did or not, but I wanted him to, believed that he might. And David couldn�t have cared less. I said nothing touched me, but that was a lie. Something did touch me on that trip: We were sharing a motel room, Max, x, and me. I remember standing in the bathroom. It must have been in Vegas because I had gone down to the salon for a haircut, trying to knock myself into the groove by changing my look. And it didn�t work. The cut was horrible, too short, made me look butch. I kept looking at my ugly new hair in the bathroom mirror. And while I examined myself in the mirror, I heard x laugh. x�s laugh sounded just like Robert�s laugh. I hadn�t heard Robert�s laugh in eight years. Hearing Robert�s laugh again made my heart break open and spill its contents onto the floor. Later, in L.A., we got drunk on red wine in x�s apartment. He put the Smiths on the stereo and Max, x, and I ran around the apartment like fools, like Robert, Max, and I used to do, x laughing Robert�s laugh the whole time. I was alive then for a bit while Robert�s laugh was in the room with me. By the time we got to Sunnyvale, x and I hated each other. It was the typical road trip shit: someone didn�t want to stop when someone else did. I didn�t want to go to Fry�s to shop for PDAs and x did and got pouty when we didn�t. (�If Sublingua wanted to go to Fry�s,� he said angrily, �we�d go to Fry�s.� Then he shut down.) I�m not saying yet what I want to say. I�m not yet sure I know how to say it. I prayed for distraction and it came, just as I had prayed for a catalyst and it came.
More lies:
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