The mornings in bed when you turn over to see someone there, a sleeping body you barely recognize. Who is this person lying next to you and what is this overwhelming feeling you have? For a moment you don’t recognize this person who has somehow managed to infiltrate your life so seamlessly. Three months ago they didn’t exist. Today, they have taken over everything, become everything.
One moment, you feel you’re in love. You’ve managed to fall in love. With a person. With this person.
Another moment, you genuinely think, Who the fuck is this person? How did they get here?
Love is a perpetual space for transition. The spaces change and follow.
Summer is not a season but a lingering shadow.
Summer is not a period but a burden of heat.
Summer is not summer but another space for dying.
The hikes out under an afternoon sun. The sun is hazy and the green of the trees seems stranger, greener somehow. It is hot and the sweat won’t stop pouring down over your brow, your nose, building up under your sunglasses. This is a place that once meant one thing and now means another. This is a place that depends almost entirely on the weather. The creek is almost nonexistent. The destination is a waterfall that is now barely a trickle. The sun is moving up there, and too, the moon is visible, like a transparent, crescent cloud that lingers like a spectral shadow.
The sun.
Again. The sun.
The steps outside in the middle of the night. You can’t sleep because your head is full and your heart is heavy. Whiskey calms the nerves. Or heightens them. One or the other. You’re sitting outside and it is cool and it is calm and your eyes welling up with tears and you just want to lie down and sprawl across the sidewalk. There is no sign of rain. It feels like it may never rain again.
You miss the rain.
You can’t remember what it feels like.
You remember the feeling of rain.
You haven’t cried in awhile. But you’re crying now.
The “people out there” that don’t seem to notice that the world is ending. That the end days aren’t a distant future. There will be no quick and brutal end, not biblical, not disastrous, not immediate, not far away, but here and now and slow and gradual and present and now and now and today and this moment: dying. The weather tells us. The sky tells us. The ground tells us. The sun tells us. We are living in the apocalypse and the apocalypse is living in us now.
Dying is a synonym for living is a synonym for dying is a synonym for changing is a synonym for time.
Hope is light is fire is death.
Waiting is hope is eternity is sadness is feeling is death.
Love is happiness is living is memory is touch is beating is breathing is breathing is breathing is death.
The heart that remains in denial and can not reconcile the sludge pile of memories and emotions. Why are feelings so complicated? So persistent? Such feelings. Let’s imagine that you can act on your feelings. That the feelings matter and can be acted upon. Let us imagine.
The sky is different every day. The sky is not blue. The sky, in fact, is not always the sky.
The city is different each moment. This city is breathing and changing and living and dying and chanting a different prayer each morning, each night, each time the sun sets.
What can you remember about yesterday? What can you remember about the sun?
The clouds have gathered into a dense mass over there.
Over there is not over here.
When you’re walking around out there, don’t you feel it? That intensity? That strange ringing in your ears, the eerie but momentary silence that signals something is about to happen.
Something has already happened.
