A Lapse, A Collapse, A Stadium Full of Clown Suits
There was my first mistake: assuming that 6pm sunglasses are a warning to those in proximity. I do not need these, you see, in the pedestrian way they are intended — nuclear holocausts I imagine, and less romantically, for high UV days where people smile to each other on the street and say, also unromantically, “Nice day, huh?”
No. Not one of those times, but those other times: to hide those hyperbolically sublime times when the eyes overflow, and gravity births their undoing onto the concrete, through my mascara, moving into my mouth. Little shapes drop their wetness like spit that is too thick, hanging a moment before quietly succumbing.
I resist the accompanying widower’s face, I think, so that if I were at an opera or a funeral, a stranger might turn to his companion and say,
“Well now, she looks mightily unaffected.”
But ha!, it isn’t so.
I am unraveling quickly. My last thought is outpaced by a hurried reach into infinity. I validate each moment. It goes:
Suicide; My father once said he was proud of me, but the skills of mine he listed were more or less this: ‘you have never been homeless’; I am worse than Hitler, because at least Hitler had ambition and also follow-through and what society would choose me over Hitler? Maybe Sweden. Yes, probably Sweden; Hitler is an adolescent reference, there are better examples — better dictators — but no one cares about Pinochet; Kissing is like small ingestions of negative space and then even smaller choreographed vomits of cluttered expectations; Surely the tragedy of this moment and most others is to die accidentally; It has been four hours since my half dose of Valium; I can take sleeping pills in two more; The sun will rise tomorrow and no virgins had to die, even though a couple of them probably did anyhow.
There is a group of six men in my way. Last week this happened and I caught myself crossing the street because I am racist, I guess, when I am walking alone at night. I am guilty, white, afraid of my fragility because my body is full of cancer. They do not know this, of course [I did not tell them], and I know most conflicts would be resolved if we all agreed to assume everyone was always dying of cancer instead of “dying from life” which probably sounds falsely Zen.
One of the men chases me as I pass, and as I turn around to meet his scurrying, he laughs. I am crying still, and I wonder what I have to do to become victimized. He leaves. They applaud. My hair feels too long, my dress too tight. I remember I did that this morning when I woke up and felt, for a moment, okay.
I am home now. Safe. But it is not for a want of trying.
