I'm an antenna in this position

This position I’m holding reminds me of an earlier time. It is the position, because this is the way I was standing. My head was like this to the side when the moment hit me. A feeling of pain was in my toe and now that the whole experience comes back to me I am thinking of my toe though it takes a while to remember what the toe had to do with anything. And there was sunburn. All of the effects can be accessed from this position as if I am an antenna picking up a signal but instead of catching waves from the air, the information is coming from within. When I was standing in this position I knew a certain set of coordinates and here they are again as I pass through that same geometry.

It is the same when I stand in the spot where he told me he would leave me. I can feel it all again and as I drink this tea I make the movements with my lips that he made when he drank. He had a way of tasting and lingering over the texture with his lazy tongue and big loose lips. These are movements of the parts of his mouth that I gazed upon so many times in our home, at our table, in our wanderings. And now as I make them it is a part of him that never left me, some kind of thin residue, long dormant and I can no longer contain it, it pours from my eyes in water and dumps onto the palms of my hands. I am looking and looking deep to see why and where and how this surfaces now and the only reason is that it was here on this spot where it happened. I couldn’t have described his method of tasting his drink but I was enacting a perfect imitation of it.

Forgetting is the only way we have of continuing to proceed through new life. But in remembering there is a depth that informs every present moment. The question is only how to interpret and how much I can take. I can continue forward but only with a shield. When the shield is down I am hindered for days. Sensations get through to the heart center discharging connections to other people and to thoughts and ideas. It is like standing close to a source of electricity and there is only so much I can stand.

The newest volume to the library to forget for later retrieval occurs in a chair and a gaze between eyes, my green ones and the green ones of a performer performing only for me. In this one-to-one performance in the proximity of nine other one-to-one performances (like a teenage kissing party without the teenage hormones or the kissing but all of the awkwardness and the same music) we all sat with another and fell to various degrees of involvement with our partners. I will never be the same. Just what you want in a performance. Just what you want in a day.

Let us sit together. Nothing more. If we sit together we can look at each other carefully. We can watch as the time goes by. We can see what when you hold my hands. How fine it will be if you stroke my hands. We two sitting and you looking at me while I look at you. You hold my hands and stroke them. I don’t stop looking at you.

Let us sit sweetly. Still together and silent. We look, we look deep, and then we look away. I laugh and you look at my hands. Then we look again. Your eyes are blinking so fast and so often. I’m waiting for you. I’m waiting for what you will say. I’m waiting for you to show me something. It isn’t that I want something. I don’t know what this is. This place where I sit is neither here nor there; it is someplace else. Sitting here all I know is that it will end.

I want a photo of the moment I closed my eyes, when I was too full and couldn’t say what was happening to me. I want to remember it, this floating, this instability. I want to hold it. But it is like water. This moment is grace. This moment won’t come again. It is single and pure and separate. This moment is one of the wells now within me, in the library of water that is my body. I’m saving for old age.

This is a story

It wouldn't do to try to scratch the itch, the spot where he felt the itch didn't actually exist anymore. A moment of clarity, that would have been good, like the moment when the stove is checked and definitely off. Later, that look can be remembered because it was sure and definite and clear and the mind can rest assured that the flame is out. In the case of the itch, the leg would have been assessed or made note of before its removal or even after its removal—maybe a moment to acknowledge the separation: there is the leg and I am here. We are two separate items. And maybe one good last scratch all around.

Now the leg is gone and the itch remains. So many habits are hard to break. If you drive a car on the left and are used to reaching out with your right hand to shift gears you still reach with your right even when you are driving in a, say, a British car where the driver sits on the right. You reach with your right even though the edge of the car is there and you bang your arm against the inside of the door. Some things become automatic. This allows the part that deals with routine take it over. It is about economy. So are legs, and in this case, two legs are more economical than one.

But the real problem is this itch. And less, in this case, is so much more. And the economy brought about by habit is that if a spot on the leg itches or tickles one doesn't make a decision to scratch it, one simply reaches down and scratches it. This becomes a problem when the itch cannot be scratched, as in the case of amputation. As in a case like this.

As his mind looks for occupation he is thinking about another brain trick, the jerk that awakens the sleeper as he falls to sleep. It is the jerk that wakes the body when the neurons are misfiring, or so they say. And now he needs an explanation as to why then there is an accompanying dream that explains the jerk? Is this to calm the mind? If so, how does the mind know to make the dream? He remembers being woken up with a jolt from a dream of falling or stepping off a step that was higher than he thought. And he has been wondering.

He told Delta about this quandary. She guessed that the mind worked so fast it worked backwards. The jerk happened and then the mind essentially rewrote the past. A blank spot of sleep oblivion now filled with an explanation for the jerk. That’s why he liked Delta. She was crazy. Can it really be all this so that the mind doesn’t waste sleep time to find the source of the violent involuntary impulse?

There was still a spot saved in his brain for that leg. That was her explanation for why he still felt that itch. His brain was refusing to rewrite the area. He wasn't letting go. He knew there was something sensical in her words but they aggravated him. She wasn't troubled by such questions. She found solutions and moved on. Sometimes, he thought, there was room for further consideration. He couldn't figure how the same brain that could rewrite the past in order to explain with a story the jerk in his body caused by loose chemicals in a response left over from hunter-gatherer times to stop him from getting up from his cozy sleep couldn’t now rewrite the existence of his right leg. He was tired of thinking about it. But the itch was still there. It had been for days now without cease.

He was on the verge of telling her to come in here and cut off his leg it was itching so much. If only he had the leg to lose he would lose it now to lose the itch. He was putting the words together in his head, lining them up in the right order, taking a breath to boost them into the next room.

And just then she comes in and she looks at him and she sees that look in his eye and she herself looks determined and as if she has a plan and she sits herself astride his chair with one leg behind him and she places her other leg where his should be and she doesn't say a word. It doesn't look like his own leg but then as he looks and looks he begins to accept that it could be and slowly, falteringly, he reaches his hand toward it and toward the spot that itches, that spot that has been itching now for as long as he can remember, a constant itch so complete it has become a pain, he scratches at first lightly and then a bit harder and the spot begins to redden but she doesn't move. She closes her eyes. Maybe she is far away. Maybe she doesn't even feel it. He continues to scratch and scratch and it is constant and steady now. He feels a rising sensation a kind of rush. And before he is fully conscious of what is happening he feels a great sense of relief, a burst, a blossoming, a kind of strange itch climax that resolves in a rush of release and a kind of internal light explosion.

As she gets up and walks away he notices that her legs are perfectly articulated from her hips and the only movement in her pelvis is a slight shifting from left to right as her weight shifts both hip bones remain parallel with her shoulders. It occurs to him that she is beautiful to watch. And he doesn't ask himself whether she's cured his itch but he'll be asking himself later.

wordless from Zagreb

Hurtling from Chicago toward Zagreb

I'm trying to understand the distance.
The distance between here and there.
The distance
between my feet and my eyes
between the bones in my neck
between the branch and the rocky sea
between any two particles
between your eyes and the back of my head
between my hand and those clouds
between the answer and the question
between the solution and the compromise
between green and purple
between the sweet and the salty snack
between the quiet and the silent
between the bump and the fall
between the bend and the sigh
the distance between
between the iris and the retina; your thoughts and your prayers; the finger and the nail; the round and the solid; whirled peas and end[less]this war.

Now I am in Zagreb and nothing is clear. Thunderstorms and waiting to feel right again. And busy working. more soon.