Glorious & empty midnight.
posted by jeremy on March 27, 2003
Motive: My own stupid propensity for boredom... & how this boredom creates a desire for something different, an unknown stimuli. To find this difference requires changing one's situation. To change one's situation, one must move. So I'm moving, here I go & there I've gone. The dense damp air is warm & smooth & wondrous.
Hello, good-night.
Another party at Nathan's. I arrive early & we crack open the first of the beers... Already, we're talking shit about this unsteady universe. Things have been strained & stagnant in my life recently. I'm ready, extremely ready to slosh out into a night of hooting desperate fun. One beer, two beers, three.
A familiar girl walks thru the door. A girl with wild hair & dark eyes. She walks right up to me & introduces herself. A subtle remembering pause.
We've met before, I tell her. Oh, she says.
There are few cars on the road tonight. The double yellow line flows happily beneath my wheels. All I can hear is the hurried air whipping around my skull & the comforting purr of clicks emanating from my freewheel.
Merodi. Tabi. Toyu. Seishin.
I'm drunk & restless but somehow ebullient.
There are so many small, such gorgeous mysteries.
My relationship with her has become slowly tired, subtly faded: I see us together, reflected in the dirty glass of some store-front & I see hairline fractures radiating out from the points where we touch.
We've been living together for nearly eight months, we've been hanging out for twice that. Our routines are set, simple, sometimes beautiful & sometimes sad. We are so comfortable, so scared. It's all so easy, too easy. She knows it too. She's been talking of a long trip to Africa & I've been thinking of the change that I know is inevitable.
Like smoke on the horizon when you're driving home, like waiting for the results of an HIV test, it leaves me impatiently terrified.
I slow to a stop at a red light as a small cluster of traffic splashes past. Silence again & as I push off, the description framed by Travis Hugh Culley in ÂThe Immortal Class' flows thru my mind...
?There is no distinction between man and machine when I mount a bike like this one. Trusting all of my weight to the right pedal of a simple pulley system, I overcome the resistance of two thin tires bound by an aluminum frame and a steel chain. A small disk at the axle of the backwheel, slowly giving way to the force of my weight, holds the pressure taut against the chain. As I lean forward, the weight of my body pulls the cog around the rear axle, turning it one inch. The wheels, held tight by a matrix of metal spokes fixed to a hub, are pulled around a set of ball bearing around the torqued cog. Eighteen inches of rubber wheel crawls forward.
In such small movements are certain miniscule worlds built or destroyed.
She bums a smoke & accompanies me out onto the high porch. We talk of our lives. Of where we are from. Of what we are doing. We talk in low confident voices, as though we are old friends, catching up. People, one by two by three, begin to arrive. The sun is dropping low in the sky.
She asks if she can sing me a song. I say yes, yes, of course & she begins to sing in a strong & beautiful voice...
& something snaps, ever-so-quietly, inside of me.
A puddle explodes in muddy joy as I skim thru it.
A distinctly covert form of happiness, I'm thinking: This easy cruising, this effortless journey. I know that this solace is nothing I truly acknowledge now, not as it happens, not viscerally, only in idiot theory, abstract writing. Sometimes I think that when & if, I become old, wrapped deathly tight in a slow age-crippled body, I will look back & I will be ashamed.
I will long for something I never knew I had: Virility, long gone muscles once strong, the sanity, the curiosity, the daring stupidity of youth.
She isn't at this party. At least, not as of yet. My need for space has been immense, overwhelming, nearly sadistic. Lately, I have been ill-tempered & impatient with her every move. Still happy times but increasingly often, sharp words, quick silence. I don't want to be this way. I despise it. I hate it. I will soon have to do something about it.
Better a quick death than the painful cancer of a struggling love.
I talk with the dark eyed girl a while longer & then old friends of mine arrive. We immediately begin to argue about metric vs. standard.
Metric, we all soddenly agree, wins the battle but never the war.
I cut up onto the opposite sidewalk. My timing & the scant slant needed in my fast turn up onto the tight pathway, it isn't there. My brain calculates, with a furious speed, the outcomes, the options available to me, these next few moments. None are satisfactory. Final report: Accept your fate, drunk-boy.
Time slows, suddenly syrup,
my blood prepares.
This is going to hurt.
She calls. She's coming to Nate's house. This is as she wants it. I am hesitant, obvious. Do you want me there? She ask & I can't say what I want. I can't say what is true. So, sure, I say. Sure. Sure. I don't know what else to do, or to say.
She'll be here in half an hour & we hang up.
Cause & effect, alcohol & bike, meat & machine: I hit the low piney hedge without even touching my brakes. I am suddenly a sparrow, a butterfly, an idiot chunk of too-fast gristle. My inertia, trajectory & mass carries me over the handlebars of my massively de-accelerated device.
I am perfectly weightless, if but for a millisecond.
She arrives & almost immediately, tensions flourish, culminate, unleash themselves: We begin to fight. Verbal, non-verbal. I am the greatest part of a horse's inconsiderate ass & she.... She is who she is, vulnerable, beautiful, furious, sad, raging. We end up standing on the corner of a nearby road, yelling at each other beneath the stuttering buzz of a streetlight. She cries & then she leaves & I just stand there, hating myself, hating all of this.
I kick at the post of the streetlight & nearly break my foot.
I turn in mid-air & land on my back, hitting my hard but helmet-less skull on harder ground & as I skid thru the wet washed-out litter & gravel, I think nothing, I only experience infinite detail, texture of pain, collusion of flesh & asphalt. Then stillness, the sound of an unseen car passing, then silence.
From happy quicksilver to damaged clown, I lay there for long minutes, letting my body tally the various points of damage, process the useless adrenalin, begin its slow cellular repair.
I lay there, suddenly stupid, savagely sober, staring up at the ancient stars that are framed thru a sudden break in the low bright clouds.
I finish, for the moment, despising myself & limp back into the party & this girl, this person who I will come to know so well, whom I will never understand, she is still there, as if waiting. My heart quickens but hurts.
Tonight, we, simple strangers, will kiss for the first time.
Tomorrow, I will end my broken-ship with this other much-loved friend & my heart will continue to hurt, to break. But in the breaking there will be change... & in such massive change, for me, there is a certain rough hope.
I finally manage to stand up. Nothing broken though my hands are bleeding, my sweater & my back both torn. I rub my head. I grin big enough to expose my long-broken tooth. I'm OK... again.
I look for my bike & there she is, doing a hand-stand in the hedge, back wheel directly above the front, slowly clicking, herself undamaged.
Perfect. Absurd & painful but undeniably perfect, this clarion call.
I can't help but begin to laugh.
