I lied
Out on the balcony, we looked down at the dark, the red lights passing every once in a while, timed with the changing of the lights at the intersection a half mile away. I wondered about this night, suddenly filled with the remembrance of crystalline breath out of the mouths of new friends. We were so alive. I was so alive. I thought, though, of, in the moment the crisp air flowed inside of me, how many things died. How many bugs were crushed this very second? How many hearts stopped? How many trees fell? How many fiery loves died in the charred wood of regret?
I remembered a face I had forgotten, so easily, but only because it didn’t even near completion. It was there, and it always would be. I am just a pawn of its memory, of that which died inside of me, but whose corpse was also to be buried with me, causing every emotion and every new sensation to be but a vine grown out of it. My roots would always be in something rotten. As of now, as of ever, I don’t and will never know if that pushes me to greater heights, if it makes my leaves blossom to wider expanses than they would have otherwise, or if I am just rotting along with it, rotting along with everything, with the billions of dead insects sinking into the mud of the earth. I think of all the generations of humans, of plants, of animals. Matter can neither be created nor destroyed. How many of my cells were dead flies? How much of me was something part of which became part of you?
I looked across the horizon, across the smoke rising from the earth like perfume from a cartoon character. Everything was beautiful in a simple way, a one-key melody on the piano. As the sun melted away, the strings of the dark blue of the night sky entered in. The flutes of the stars would crescendo. They all played to the beat of the moon. I listened for a moment to its rhythm, and then I followed him inside.
I remembered a face I had forgotten, so easily, but only because it didn’t even near completion. It was there, and it always would be. I am just a pawn of its memory, of that which died inside of me, but whose corpse was also to be buried with me, causing every emotion and every new sensation to be but a vine grown out of it. My roots would always be in something rotten. As of now, as of ever, I don’t and will never know if that pushes me to greater heights, if it makes my leaves blossom to wider expanses than they would have otherwise, or if I am just rotting along with it, rotting along with everything, with the billions of dead insects sinking into the mud of the earth. I think of all the generations of humans, of plants, of animals. Matter can neither be created nor destroyed. How many of my cells were dead flies? How much of me was something part of which became part of you?
I looked across the horizon, across the smoke rising from the earth like perfume from a cartoon character. Everything was beautiful in a simple way, a one-key melody on the piano. As the sun melted away, the strings of the dark blue of the night sky entered in. The flutes of the stars would crescendo. They all played to the beat of the moon. I listened for a moment to its rhythm, and then I followed him inside.