July 17
Back home late tonight from a bluegrass show at a bar down the Parks Highway—the band in which my co-worker plays guitar & sings. & all through the evening, the dim lights showering the worn wooden floor, the filtered half-assed gloaming feathering in through the milky windows, the too-drunk dance partner lumbering his weight into the frail frame of a woman while she forced a conciliatory grin, the clusters of friends clapping & stomping, all of it some spinning maelstrom of gaiety, & it absolutely & unequivocally suffocated me. I downed my beer & could not leave quickly enough, even though the music was warm & the atmosphere relaxed & inviting. I am balking at joy now, intermittently. My being alone will sometimes terrify me. I have this sorrow in me growing by the day, by the hour, palpably, twining its barb, wiring querulous & metallic through my every vein. Each night it seems I die a little, & I try conjuring some viable angle of reprieve, but there seems no ready balm. My heart is my weight entire. Set me to scale & it touches ground alone. Here is a bit of vanity for you: I thought this evening while I waited in line to urinate how I must look at least a fraction of the depressed that I am. In the bathroom I took a picture of myself & looked at it & saw immediately something bitterly sad. I have made practice of regarding myself when mirrors are available, looking into my selfsame eyes & repeating my name a few times. Invariably I leave off swiftly, some sharp “what the fuck” spilling from my lips unbidden. Looking at this picture only reified further what I had only dimly suspected. I look the wreck I feel. The shipwreck of the singular. & so.
The thing about it is this: all of the beauty & joy & sorrow & heartbreak & all of those idiosyncrasies that make you burn with a sense of what it feels to be human were there. I witness anymore, other to these abstractions. There, the over-zealous girl showing a tattoo of a star between her gaunt shoulderblades to a group of flannel-clad drunkards. There, the chisel-face self-conscious & doe-eyed with an upturned leather collar & an old cap who sidles & leans against the bar like some cut-out of James Dean. There, the girl next to him, running her small hand through her briar-patch hair & fidgeting her fingers on her elbow, trying to draw his eye. There, the couple locked in a dance more embrace than anything else, the world in its dizzied perambulations fading dim & distant into some periphery, exiled a priori by raw & unmitigated presence. & there, the aping face of the mohawked bartender acting out his role in front of the dozen or so craven strangers who surround the bar with bouquets of dollar bills clutched in their white fingers & the same rehearsed vacant countenance, each & all. All of us here, our irises brightly jittering like water mosquitoes, darting haphazard through the room, looking for some small grace on which to alight. Anymore, I am satisfied merely to lean back & gaze upon some square of space, the way it gets filled, its tensions, its pressures, its taut silences or its vigorous animations. & I could watch strangers dance all night, if I weren’t suddenly ghosted by some agoraphobic itch to run back to my solitude. I love & am utterly heartbroken by the humanness in us, our vulnerabilities, how they refuse concealment, how they clamor against the calm. Our frailties. Our thin passions straining against some music overloud. How everything is built & destroyed in an unwitting eyeblink. How we falter under banners of our progress. How we are, sad & pining after some fugitive joy. The heart in us.
The thing about it is this: all of the beauty & joy & sorrow & heartbreak & all of those idiosyncrasies that make you burn with a sense of what it feels to be human were there. I witness anymore, other to these abstractions. There, the over-zealous girl showing a tattoo of a star between her gaunt shoulderblades to a group of flannel-clad drunkards. There, the chisel-face self-conscious & doe-eyed with an upturned leather collar & an old cap who sidles & leans against the bar like some cut-out of James Dean. There, the girl next to him, running her small hand through her briar-patch hair & fidgeting her fingers on her elbow, trying to draw his eye. There, the couple locked in a dance more embrace than anything else, the world in its dizzied perambulations fading dim & distant into some periphery, exiled a priori by raw & unmitigated presence. & there, the aping face of the mohawked bartender acting out his role in front of the dozen or so craven strangers who surround the bar with bouquets of dollar bills clutched in their white fingers & the same rehearsed vacant countenance, each & all. All of us here, our irises brightly jittering like water mosquitoes, darting haphazard through the room, looking for some small grace on which to alight. Anymore, I am satisfied merely to lean back & gaze upon some square of space, the way it gets filled, its tensions, its pressures, its taut silences or its vigorous animations. & I could watch strangers dance all night, if I weren’t suddenly ghosted by some agoraphobic itch to run back to my solitude. I love & am utterly heartbroken by the humanness in us, our vulnerabilities, how they refuse concealment, how they clamor against the calm. Our frailties. Our thin passions straining against some music overloud. How everything is built & destroyed in an unwitting eyeblink. How we falter under banners of our progress. How we are, sad & pining after some fugitive joy. The heart in us.
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