This is what all happened in one night, give or take.
"Elise, you are bleeding."
One Friday. A dream of a train ride. Suburbia deep into downtown.
"I don't care anymore."
Neon sobs and menstrual facades. Smeary and hidden.
"But you should."
Come with me. Come. This will be a story of concupiscent abstinence, a modest fleshy tale wrapped around unchaste bones. Sinless and degenerate, a miscreant jest, forbidden.
"I will tear your stupid pink-vermilion flesh with my yellowing teeth."
Are we now just laughingstocks? Vague punchlines in so many cosmic jokes? Stooges in some frothing, galactic burlesque?
"Uh, okay..."
A life reduced: sex or not. Yearning or dread.
"You are so depressingly weak."
"Whatever."
***
This is the moment we all thought was coming, a fugue formed on a spectral hill; we grow our gardens here, bleed our victims, and love each nod and gesture highlighting so many mirror-image blastocysts. We surpass ourselves.
I was your friend, and I marveled at the sunlit canopy above while clamorous street cars hissed and passed, leadenly clanking, iron-faced.
"You were my friend," you said. "I loved you."
Although none of this was ever layered in flesh upon so many phantom bones. It only came to pass in labyrinthine dreams.
"I no longer know what you're trying to say."
"Me either. But trust me—it still needs to be said."
"I can't keep doing this. It's an endless stream of dreams, each one second-guessed by the next. We're bamboozled by timelines. All of our nows browbeaten by our thens. Just let me be, and wait while I sip this exquisite coffee and divide this pie with a fork. Where were we?"
"Here. In a Pacific Northwest reverie."
"Cascadia?"
"Oh, yes."
"Two heaped teaspoons?"
"Very good. Clever."
"God forbid you'd ever laugh."
***
Some sectioned limb unfolds itself so close to the horizon, we default into sweet-girl doom-pixie love—Eliza Doolittle, Amélie, Zooey, Rooney, more—ignoring such reality, a reach-around from callused arachnid palms, an imposition, all our aspirations paramount, flames of love sustained, a path portrayed and then proclaimed, so easy to unlearn each living segment of our drastic narrative.
"My name is Eve, and I'm an addict."
"You really don't want to talk about that slimeball Adam."
The serpent slithers far beneath the palm fronds and the cedar boughs, only glancing back when blent and gusted love is finally defined: our hearts are filled with pain, and situational awareness aims to spend our buoyant, airy capital.
"Call me. Call me now. Okay?"
Elise is seeking not vengeance but balance. She seethes a culinary phalanx. Plays herself in video games complicit and askance.
This timorous howl is poetry right now. Wait until the sockeye find their wild elusive thread, triggering our western coastal shimmer, blare, and thunder. Gift to us this roiling tidal squirm, breathe from us this raw, rare planetary air, drop rain squalls over and upon us. Welcome, grey wolf. Welcome, spirit bear.
O Earth. O endless love.
***
Elise has left. Her bloodstain remains. A vaguely carmine map of shadow blame.
This place is likened to some flippant home, a shell-like choir of intravenous drones, a cenotaph, dark and fatalistic brickwork; some distilled, some lost, some wretched absent aching monument.
A path. Follow it. Follow it and sing your verification song, your signature, your cultivating aplomb.
Before us is the tale itself. Then follow it…
We are none. Our shaken ranks resist decoding. Unscramble this, our fury. Our purest fury. Our one kilometre stare. Our relatable and incandescent rage.
Something emerges from the trees, hunches ungainly across the trail, slides queasily into the oily lake.