Everywhere & Nowhere
Two stories I want to eventually write:
About the afterlife, which is really just like being in a dream all the time: loose, fragmentary, unbound by physics or other rules to which we are so accustomed in our realm. If you concentrate hard enough, you become lucid and self-aware. You can direct your post-corporeal experience anywhere, conjure up all the people you ever knew and never knew, revisit any place you'd ever been. But mostly you just float in some ether of what could only be called an elemental consciousness of being. Pretty soon you realize you are not you, and the distinction between self and other is false. You become muddled. You lose sight of all that constituted your individuality, all the heartaches and joys that built a life. You are no longer you. You are all, you are god, you are everyone you ever knew and never knew. But, oh, to love, to love.
Falling in love. With everyone. Sometimes I have these wild fantasies about loving someone for a lifetime. It happens when I'm stoned, it happens when I'm sober. I was at this panel discussion yesterday and became mildly enamored of this German literary agent who (I thought) kept on locking eyes with me. (A friend told me today he's married -- to a woman, sigh.) But in that moment, feeling warm and woozy from one glass of wine, I could visualize perfectly the life I would have with this German man, the morning sun in his apartment, his gentleness, the stories he would tell me about his childhood or years in London, the music we would listen to, the shape of him next to me in bed. I have had similar telescoping reveries about _____, a French instructor I once had (actually, make that two), other boys whom I regard with ambivalence, C., current/former classmates of mine, somebody I might see at the airport, and so on. Oh, to love. What does it all mean.
About the afterlife, which is really just like being in a dream all the time: loose, fragmentary, unbound by physics or other rules to which we are so accustomed in our realm. If you concentrate hard enough, you become lucid and self-aware. You can direct your post-corporeal experience anywhere, conjure up all the people you ever knew and never knew, revisit any place you'd ever been. But mostly you just float in some ether of what could only be called an elemental consciousness of being. Pretty soon you realize you are not you, and the distinction between self and other is false. You become muddled. You lose sight of all that constituted your individuality, all the heartaches and joys that built a life. You are no longer you. You are all, you are god, you are everyone you ever knew and never knew. But, oh, to love, to love.
Falling in love. With everyone. Sometimes I have these wild fantasies about loving someone for a lifetime. It happens when I'm stoned, it happens when I'm sober. I was at this panel discussion yesterday and became mildly enamored of this German literary agent who (I thought) kept on locking eyes with me. (A friend told me today he's married -- to a woman, sigh.) But in that moment, feeling warm and woozy from one glass of wine, I could visualize perfectly the life I would have with this German man, the morning sun in his apartment, his gentleness, the stories he would tell me about his childhood or years in London, the music we would listen to, the shape of him next to me in bed. I have had similar telescoping reveries about _____, a French instructor I once had (actually, make that two), other boys whom I regard with ambivalence, C., current/former classmates of mine, somebody I might see at the airport, and so on. Oh, to love. What does it all mean.