(no subject)

[proximoception]

When once the lights went out you had to assume it would be forever. So when the fluorescent went dim and then a day later the dim started to flicker everyone in the room went into a sort of frenzy. We'd all been fairly sedate before, but now love was being declared. I love yous, in language or proof-touch, here and there, but mostly other things we loved or had. Talk of them, letters mostly sans recipient. Many songs; it seemed like all six of us had been hiding a guitar somewhere in that small space till then. Paint: spilled buckets and some shattered bottles of condiments were slid about in from corner to corner and as high up the walls as the tallest hands could go. For a while we dipped our hair in it and remade each other. The paste on the floor soon incorporated not just the shattered bottle glass but everything the great desk had contained, then splintered guitars, then the hair we cut off once it formed helmet-like crusts and started itching, or aching our necks from its weight. In the middle where a few of us slipped in memorable simultaneity the clear spot became the low point of the room, as furniture and bodies and unaccountable clumps of texture now amphitheatred up in jags, as though an air volcano had erupted in an atmosphere of lava. While others rested one or two of us would speak of love. Of missing things, mostly, or being about to miss them. I spoke of tacos. What would happen when you licked one. How the newborn cool of diced tomatoes behind the wall of dead ground larded fried dried corn paste with its creaking and its sugarglass fragility and sandpaper hostility seemed to freshen as though unimpeded, like the voice of a mother behind a door, while the cheese and lettuce fragments lay as light and foreign as the dirtcrumbs in the nostrils of the dead. The darkness cut color away as I finished and we all cuddled up in the flat space in the center and shivered as one in the silence. In darkness you're part of the ground. The intimacy of gravity's self-lit, though nothing else is. Where you end is no less clear, but it doesn't matter as much. Each you is too clearly a segment of something unending that covers the earth, or whatever the earth becomes in total dark.

Till it all snapped back on. Months have passed, dim months, but without any flickers. And we're all still here. We resumed our routine soon enough. We cleaned the room. The dark's return is never spoken of, but little else is either. The loves have all been swept beneath a planet's-worth of rug. You wonder how it will be when it starts to go again, with no more guitars, with no more mustard. And every last can of tomatoes we ate at first light.