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Minor details in a minor key—Bandoleros throwing chubby young women over their shoulders; the view of Africa from a balcony; the longest of nights, darkest of days; months by the pool. I look and look, but never see your face. If decorative bottles and tins of pills were currency we would be rich, you and me—our golden bodies in a constant stage of merger, avoidance, repetition, healing. If silence was a drug we would have been Venus-bound from birth. These eyes never stop searching, devouring features and landscapes—the brain struggles to keep pace, dedicated to the act of remembering. These arms, long exhausted from reaching, have atrophied and died but the hands still keep a sullen vigil, making notes the first Wednesday of every third month concerning how little has changed in the atmosphere. Poison is still poison, after all. A mile is still a body of water. Three drinks is still catharsis. I must have taken two hundred pictures of the Eiffel tower and felt no closer to Paris, no closer to home, no closer to the way your smiling mouth constricts a straw, no closer to Heaven, or Jesus, or Lindsey—lost somewhere in the mountains of Italy or the desert just outside Las Vegas. It’s ugly, and we’re no strangers to the concept, knowing it never matters how a story began so long as you control the ending. What we’re left with is a cowboy hat and bi-annual beer, a nervous tic, another half-dozen equally worthless lovers. What we’re left with is nothing we haven’t paid for—thirty thousand words and an unquenchable rage. Fill a bucket with pennies and you’re left with thousands of uncovered eyes, blind from birth. Tell someone you love ‘goodbye’ and ‘God bless’. Sit by her grave and write a brand new vernacular. Drive up and down the coast for ten years and tell me how the sun feels on your skin. I like the keeping in touch, if that can be said to be what this is.
Adam