In this Saturday afternoon on these carefree pages I realize that I am no longer sad. Not that I intend to have fun through the usual venues of eating and drinking with friends, just that, I am in a peaceful state of disrepair, free from any physical threat and unable to be compelled by motivations. It would be more apt to say these sentences if I am reclining on a checkered woven chair on the summer balcony surrounded by trees of vibrant colors and the birds that chirp on them, perhaps in a medium-sized city run through by traffic that is neither bustling nor spare, but is only constant. But I am not - I sit on where I have usually sat, amongst various screens turning themselves off and the buzz of the ventilator that is still on.
I crack open the curtain to see the whiteness of the January sky, freed from the elation of Christmas and the New Year that now as if didn't occur and watch these lines of words forming out of a vast absence of any restful things that occupy me - the planes, tanks and machine guns many are imaginarily combating, the guitar string that spastically fiddles, the documents and projects and all the wistfulness of dreams that wait to be accomplished appear not very dissimilar to the ventriloquists of an aimless parade touring around an empty building. I am more moved by the freshness of the lawn that sits immovably outside, the archaic softness of my own pillow and the quiet lament of the piano. These things strike me as more lucid and more readily appreciated than the high and tantalizing edifices of humanity that have thus far so eagerly catered to the whims.
I imagine walking on the misty street that stretches away from beneath this room, singing a childhood song that intones in the frigid cold as the northern wind blows on the dormant ground and the treetops waver in my childish fugue. Meanwhile, distant apartment windows, ablaze from their inner warmth, shines sprinkling lights through the gray twigs into nowhere. I find wonderful companionships in these images - in their dilapidation I find calm; in their ancient expanse I find a sense of direction and in their subtle quiescence I find liveliness. But as with all the imaginations, the moment I step out and even only quiver at the thought of going to the trees, I cede into the tormenting cold and my utter diminution. I prefer my tired progression in life affairless and embossed only in hopeless yearnings and occasional twitches of the mind, while I unremittingly revel in my fantasy of the distant winds, stifled laughters, and the wild serious sex that I unsexually have, even though the winds might have long stopped, the laughters disappeared and the sex orgasmed. I revel not in their lush presence but in their unascertainable absence, in their gradual but inexorable paling, and in their passages of a past long past away.
The apartment window hangs there in a cold emotionless suspension. The merry gray sky has rescinded into a sort of deep fluorescent blue. These clouds and fogs, selfsame and perpetual, drift around and around into the highness of the space, into another of the day's end like the an anonymous and forever ode. I stand amongst what is left of today: my head tilting upward and my mouth half-open, in this absurdist reverse painting of my own sterrennacht.
So I, rattled by these soulless abstractions, mournfully twist my fingers into a tentative circle, as if seizing, as if letting go, of this turbid evening air.
