Master of None
If the heart is a caged bird, it is nothing mysterious. On the fifth day of my illness, my heart rattled in my ribcage like a canary with a clipped-wing. Acid-yellow and very light, was its countenance. I ran into you quite by accident and by everyday you were not so beautiful. How do you tell someone it is lidded in rooms, that they cast off the best light? I was chasing after paper-phantoms. I was a phantom on paper. I was tracing out continents, stirring abstractions into coffee-clouds. I was only sad because I was nowhere myself. And what better thing to insist upon than a sadness, a sadness like a fur shrug. By evening, if it was some time in the 1920s we would be the nameless debutantes, stepping out automobiles on to curbs. Pearl-skin, fur-shrugs. This obsession with the bygone, it had to be borne from the systematic disavowal of the present, the present that was nothing like a present but more like a free gift. Today as a free gift, a pen that doesn't work, or one with ink that smudges. My mother always said, "there's no such thing as a free lunch". I hated to regard things in the heartless economics of give-and-take, gain and loss. Would you rather measure loss, or have something taken from you without realizing what? Would you rather pine the abstraction, or as you unhook your shadow from your shoulders at night, trace your fingers delicately against the sutures. The missing hand, the missing heart, the missing eye. Didn't they always say these flaws lent us charm. Sure, I could be charming. I'm charming, I'm charming, I'm charming the earthworms, I thought to myself, as I lay in the quick and the mud, the warm rut.