who has time?

I've started losing days, and I'm not talking about those little dissociative episodes where I just can't remember them. I've been keeping track on my calendar, see. Every day I wake up and mark off that day, and recently days have been turning up missing. This Wednesday, last Tuesday, the Saturday before that. And so on. And I take inventory of my things and where I am and there's nothing mysterious--nothing to indicate that I did something on those missing days and just forgot about my calendar.

So I started asking around--casually, of course. Nobody seems to notice anything weird about the days I've missed. They all remember it, and lots of them seem to think I was there. And how do you press for details when you were allegedly there? The last thing I needed was people to start thinking I was crazy, especially if I really was.

But I couldn't give up, either. So I kept asking, and if anyone noticed they never let on. I kept notes, tried to figure out if there was some sort of pattern. I spent nights going over the data, looking for something, anything, that might explain. But there was nothing.

And then last night someone mentioned my project, and I knew they referred to this--months of data leading to nothing. They said I was working on it on one of the missing days. And did I change anything? Is something different? I can't tell. I can't see anything that I've worked on.

And then: "You seemed to think you'd finally figured something out," they said. "It must feel good to have everything figured out."

recklessly yours

I tried cautious for a while, and it never worked out. Oh, I told myself I wasn't letting things get away--it was a calculated loss, the risks weren't worth it, whatever excuse I could come up with--but, as they say, nothing ventured, nothing gained. I ventured nothing, and gained nothing.

I wish I could say that some introspection or philosophical thought had changed my mind, but we both know it was because I finally met you, and I knew that I'd never be able to keep up with someone so chaotic with meticulous planning and cautious deliberation. You broke me, and within a week I was ruled by my whims--at least as far as you were concerned. And the whims of a cautious man are a wild thing indeed.

But they weren't enough--you left me behind, a force of nature, impossible to keep up with even for the very best of us. But utterly captivating. Of course I abandoned any pretenses of caution for you. I acted on impulse alone. And what's more, after a while, it wasn't just for you anymore. I wanted to. I wondered how I'd even gotten by when day-to-day living wasn't an adventure. When I was too afraid to take risks even when the gains were spectacular.

But nothing could keep up with you. If I were still my cautious self I should have given up years ago--before I'd even started, really. It was a fool's hope at best.

And yet.

song about a man

The people in these songs should have names.

She worried about words and names, because words and names were important. She read articles about how language was a prison and books about how language would set us free, and she agreed with them all. And when life got chaotic she relied on names and words to keep things in order, because these things could never be taken away from her.

But life was always chaotic and it often resisted being described, and so she couldn't impose her order on it. Too much of life defied description. It was enough that she couldn't use her words--the words that carried her through everything--to explain things to others, to convince them, to make them understand. On some nights she couldn't even shape them to her own liking.

And yet, she clung to these words, because words are important, because the alternative was to come unchained from the sun entirely, to plummet endlessly through the dark, away from all suns--so she chose her words carefully. But with each failing she withdrew, into worlds of beautiful words, into worlds she could describe. Sometimes she worried if she was hiding, but she didn't know any other way.

only fear excites us

I've spent so much time running and hiding I never stopped to consider the nature of fear--I just knew that I'd rather run than fight it, and so run I did. That's been my life, because there's a lot to be afraid of in the world. Not just my enemies and my problems, but things like love, friendship, commitment, responsibility. Fear drives me. But I always thought of it as something shameful, something to hide from.

Then someone finally caught me before I could run and I lived in fear of her for years, before I realized: I've never been so alive as when I'm terrified. It's not that I'm happy--it's more real, more visceral than that. I understood why people watch horror movies--only when we're terrified that the worst is going to happen do we live up to that glorious human potential.

So I stopped running--and I certainly stopped fighting, if I ever had. If there was anything I could do it was let it wash over me, live for the thrill of the moment, and damn the consequences. Because this is all there is--fear doesn't just drive us, it defines us. There's nothing else. It's only when we've realized that that we can finally see the beauty to it.

elevator

No light is a light.

I walked into this elevator every day knowing that one day it would fail on me. The way it shuddered and moaned as it took me to my destination--for me and no one else--I knew it would be the end of me. So taking the lift became something of a religious experience for me. I was facing my death every day.

I came into the office late one night because I had some extra work I wanted to do before the weekend, and I stepped into the elevator with the sense that it would never reach the top, that this time it would kill me. It turns out I was almost right. It lurched to a halt well before my tenth floor office, but the door opened. I stepped through--what else could I do?--and instead of an elevator shaft, I found a vast, dark expanse. I could only see a few feet in the darkness, but there appeared to be catwalks and scaffolding, at least enough to walk on.

I walked carefully, but the floor was never treacherous. Eventually the elevator was a tiny speck of light in the distance. I kept walking. It must have been miles now, and my legs were too tired to go on, so I sat down and rested. Was there a point to this, or, for that matter, an end to it?

It hardly seemed to matter. When I'd rested I got up and continued, now taking random turns, losing myself in the lightless expanse of walkways. I felt like I should have been frightened or worried, but I felt nothing of the sort. Instead I felt a confidence I never knew in my daily life, and had a spring in my step I hadn't felt since I was young and full of idiot optimism. I was taking impossible steps in an impossible place, but even that couldn't stop me.

impress me

Guess what I've been reading.

She orders a coffee just for the look of things, and sometimes she pretends to drink it. He drinks his, and when his eyes leave his own cup it's only to glance at hers. She smiles at this: he is afraid to meet her gaze, to look at anything besides her hands as they cradle the cup, turn it, raise it slowly--he is afraid and, she can see in his frightened eyes, he is not keeping up, either. He's still thinking about his coffee and she is talking, the rain and the wind and the storms, and weather systems a hundred miles away, still forming in the turbulent Pacific, ready to rip across the rain-soaked land, rend trees apart, plunge communities into darkness.

And as she tears across the landscape of his mind he tries to smile at some turn of phrase, even to interject something--his chance for a joke--but she has already moved on from there, leaving ruin in her wake, and so he returns to his coffee. He can keep up with his coffee, which is white and sweet, which he fidgets with like a nervous habit. She smiles again and lets the silence take him, and he fills it with nonsense, apologetic babble, disjointed thoughts, stumbling over themselves, trying to impress and failing--FEMA in the wake of her devastation, bumbling around, unable to make sense of what has happened much less do anything with it, much less move on.

Still he talks, and now it's her turn to focus on the coffee--dark and bitter and burning hot, but not nearly hot enough for her--she could be drinking the sun, drinking supernovae, drinking the jets from black holes, and it would still feel so cold--so she generates her own heat, burns up whole galaxies and leaves nothing standing.

"I'm not waiting for the universe to grow cold," she says, and this time he looks at her, startled. "And you're going to have to learn to keep up." And she finishes her coffee and leaves with a laugh.

cream invades the coffee black, reprise

I used to take my coffee black. I never understood these weird little rituals she had of pouring and stirring or not stirring and watching the little spirals spread through her coffee's unsullied surface. It all seemed so unnecessary--I guess I just thought of coffee as nothing more than something to drink. Energy in the mornings, keeping long nights longer, sure, but it was, first and foremost, a beverage. I used to believe a lot of strange things.

We never discussed it, of course. I became used to her rituals, and she became used to what, if I ever thought about it, I probably thought of as my no-nonsense approach. I hadn't yet realized that there's no such thing as "no-nonsense." But there were worlds of meaning being exchanged, even if I wasn't aware of it. Perhaps neither of us were, but I think she understood. She was much better at nuance than I.

I probably should have noticed, for instance, that eventually her ritual got shorter. Sometimes she'd forgo the cream or the sugar. And somehow when she did pour and stir--and she always stirred now--it didn't feel like a ritual anymore. But who was I to wonder about someone's tastes changing? Nor did I really pay any mind when the waitress asked if I wanted cream and I said "sure, why not?" instead of my usual "no, I'm good."

Then one day we were supposed to meet for coffee and she wasn't there. She wasn't anywhere. She'd disappeared, like she always talked about doing--I didn't know she'd meant it. I started to take cream in my coffee then, and since then I've started doing all sorts of other things, like pay attention to the little things.

state line, reprise

We crossed from Washington to Idaho in high spirits under a cool evening sky, with the lights just beginning to shine along Stateline Road. From the freeway you couldn't miss that you'd just crossed the state line--not because of the signs but because the state line was shimmering and alive. It wasn't long before we'd left Idaho behind--some winding through the countryside, stopping once for gas and something to drink--and then we were in the vast expanse of Montana, an endless night drive through spring snow in the mountains.

I remember very clearly what happened in which states, even though the terrain blends together, and in that part of the country I couldn't tell you a photograph of one state's landscape from another. It's important, somehow. After Montana, which stretched on forever, it was North Dakota, and just knowing that we'd finally left the state behind put me at ease, even if I knew that North Dakota would be just as dull.

There wasn't much else interesting on the road, but one time, much later, when I was visiting a girl I knew in Wisconsin, I took her out for a walk and we walked along the state line as well as I could manage it. She humored me, I think, but she didn't understand, not really. There's a magic to it, though.

born for trouble

I try to live my life in such a way that it never hurts when I cede ground and nobody will notice when I flee by cover of darkness. There's no point fighting battles you can't win, and I've long ago resigned myself to the fact that I simply can't win any of them--not really, not in a meaningful way. So instead I run. And when I can't run, I surrender. It's always been easy.

But life is made up of these little moments where everything falls apart, and where suddenly that matters. It came lying on the grass in a park north of town watching the clouds, lazily arguing over whether it was going to rain, because of course neither of us knew--it was that sort of a sky. And then the raindrops started falling--gently, lightly, like she knew they would, and I admitted defeat and listened to her laugh and at that moment I realized: I can't run away from this one.

It's strange how you perfectly remember moments like that. The world had been collapsing around me for months, and I was okay with that because I was ready to go gentle into that good night. But even the path of least resistance sometimes takes unexpected turns, and suddenly I cared. I wanted to fight it. I wanted to rage and scream--ineffectually, all--against everything collapsing around me. Anything to keep me from taking the next train south.

I could have been on the train months ago. I should have been. But something stopped me--nothing has ever stopped me before. Now I'm trying to fight something, and it's a losing battle, but I'm trapped and somehow surrender is not an option.

sturm und drang

We were driving across the country and well into the middle of nowhere, somewhere in Wyoming I think, when I was finally too tired to continue, and certainly too tired to notice that the sky had gone dark with storm clouds. "All right, go ahead and sleep," she said. "I'll wake you up if there's a tornado or something."

I smiled, because I thought it was a joke, because this was the sort of joke she made. I slept--not easily, because we were traveling, but I slept, curled up in the back, trying to find a position that wasn't too uncomfortable. Then she touched my knee and said "hey, wake up, there's a tornado." At first I just laughed and said, "what?" as if she was joking. Then I realized she'd parked the car. I sat up.

It was huge and close and terrifying, and there wasn't much we could do but sit and hope that it passed. I got out my camera and snapped a few pictures. After a long moment of silence she started fiddling with the radio, trying to find something. Eventually she found a station that had a man talking about it in that calm-but-serious-and-concerned newscaster's voice, and that was all we could hear for a while.

We were miles from anything that counted as civilization, though we didn't think about that until much later. It could have destroyed cities. It certainly could have destroyed us. But my instinct wasn't to flee. We sat and watched it until it broke up. After a while she turned the radio off and we watched the stormclouds in silence.

Then one of us said something like "that was beautiful," and she started the car and we continued driving. It wasn't until we'd left Wyoming far behind that either of us spoke again.

ageless

I don't remember when I stopped telling people how old I was. At first it was just about secrets: a secret I have and you don't is useful, isn't it? You can't do anything with my age if you don't have it--I'm always just the right age until you learn how old I am. That was how it started.

I do remember when it stopped being about that. There was a girl who demanded to know my age, and suddenly I didn't know how to answer the question. I'd walked the earth for a dozen lifetimes when she asked, and I'd walk it for countless more after. And I knew with certainty as I traced my finger along her spine two things: that I could trust her with all of my secrets, and that I would ultimately forget her entirely. Even these pages I'm writing now will be lost to memory. Maybe they already are.

I never told her my secrets. I stopped seeing her after a few weeks, and moved on. There were others, of course. There were so many others.

Then there was another girl who asked me my age. How could I tell her I never existed before today, that this was the only moment I knew, the only moment I'd ever know? This was forever, right now, and if I told her she'd have all of this eternity to judge me. I couldn't tell her that, but I told her all of my secrets, almost by accident. They just came out, one after the other, until I realized that I knew nothing about her: but here I was, brand new and trusting her. It was a mistake, of course, but how was I to know before it was too late?

dazzling

The sun came out for the first time in what feels like months today, but sunshine comes and goes--there are entire weeks when I couldn't tell you what the weather was like because I've got better things to do than look at the sky. But tonight--tonight I walked out under the clear sky and the all the lights dazzled my eyes, and I walked the city sidewalks like a dream.

I'd spent the past months living in a world that was in sharp focus, the diluted daylight of a cloudy day making it all perfectly clear. By sunlight this afternoon I was starting to see things coming undone--some shots and scenes too sharp, too brilliant, too eye-catching, to be actually real. But that's what bright spring days always feel like, isn't it? There's a chill in the air and it's like a veil has been lifted.

I never thought anything of it before tonight, because tonight is when I realized that a veil had been lifted. As the lights blinded me with their brilliance and the city floated past me, I realized that the clouds had been concealing the simple fact that the world I knew, the focused world, the understandable world, didn't exist. These strange brilliant overwhelming lights and the strange formlessness, the fickle light of the moon, these are what's real. There are no edges, only blurs.

So tonight I bought a bottle of coffee liqueur and sat on my porch, drinking and laughing as the city lights finally overwhelmed me.

in perpetuity

Life is a series of eternities strung together. Some are the kind of eternity that can't last long enough, playing outside in the autumn leaves with your sister and never wanting this to end, a chill in the air and something magical and perfect about the leaves. These are the days that feel distant. Some are the kind of eternity that we pray will end, where the whole universe conspires against you, when everything goes wrong and hope is a word you say with contempt--the world is fucked, society is fucked, you're fucked.

Except this particular eternity really has lasted forever. Or perhaps not. But it's been centuries now--I can't really keep track of time--and nothing has changed. I'm still the same as I was, young, terrified, in love, and she's still living her own life, uncomfortably aware of me but too afraid to hurt anyone.

If "still" is even the word. This is how it's always been. The moments before are just memories, and there is no after. I said it's been centuries but they're all happening at once, continuously, forever, and every part of these centuries have been just one moment.

It should be some sort of hell, but hell shouldn't feel so alive.

arena

I've been here before.

I fell from the back of a respectable theatre into some arena that was entirely other. I went from slinking in the shadows to standing in the spotlight, or near enough to it, bloodied from the fall, afraid, confused. All eyes in the house witnessed my arrival, and now they were all watching. There was someone else on the stage with me, and I understood, as one does in dreams, that we were meant to fight. The stage fright was quickly replaced by a more primal sort of fear: we were going to fight, and I'd never fought anyone before.

The lights focused on me and there was a moment of silence. I was already bloody from falling onto the stage, and I know I looked grim. Perhaps I wasn't here to fight after all. Then I spat blood and dropped into a fighting stance, and they cheered. My fear had faded into what I can only call the thrill of the fight. My opponent and I weren't enemies at all, and the crowd wasn't here for something so trivial as entertainment--and as far as we were concerned they weren't there at all.

Then it was over. There were no more lights, no more crowds, just us, bleeding and bruised and alive. Just an abandoned old theater with bits of ceiling open to the stars above, just our blood and bruises to mark that it had happened at all. We could have stayed, maybe even should have, but the moment passed, and the night moved on.

by any other name

I find that nobody can remember my name. This has been going on for some years now, but in the past few months the problem seems to be getting worse--which is how I first noticed it. For a while I assumed it was some quirk of my friends, that they couldn't pick a name for me. Then I moved, and the problem moved with me. Perhaps my names don't fit me, I thought. I find that when I think of my names, nothing comes to mind--they're blank places in my thought, and maybe they're just not very interesting names. Who knows?

But then people who'd known me for years started forgetting my name, and though they acted like they'd known me for a while, they stopped acting like they knew anything about me. I was this person they knew, but they couldn't tell you how they knew me, or anything about me. I was a person-shaped void in their lives. I started making it a point to say my name as often as possible, and I adopted quirks and affectations that would make me more memorable. This seemed to work for a while, but if I let them out of my sight I'd have to remind them who I was again with my quirks.

And then they weren't even remembering me, just my stupid affectations. But it was close enough to living that I managed for a while. It wasn't until my girlfriend started giving me that glassy stare when she saw me, that 'how do I know you again?' look, that I started to lose control. "It's me," I'd tell her, and I could tell she knew we were dating, but the details had become just a blur.

I had to break up with her, of course. I couldn't stand it, and thanks to her I couldn't stand any of it now. It wasn't just that people couldn't remember anything about me, I decided--it was that there was nothing about me to remember.

i don't trust this sky

I've been reading the sky since I was a kid. I could always tell what the weather would be by looking at it--where other people, even the weather forecasters, seemed to have a hard time of it. I just knew. The rest of the world had its secrets, but the sky revealed everything to me. So I always made sure I lived somewhere with plenty of sky. I had a brief stint in the city and found it intolerable. There was too much in the way.

It's been strange these days. It's showing me things it's never shown me before, and none of them are good. Each one is telling me the world's going to end soon, and the time is getting closer. Vermin and fire falling from the sky, the sky furling up like a scroll, freak weather phenomena. This is the end.

The problem is, when it's not warning me about the end, the rest of it is getting harder and harder to understand, and the weather's getting more and more unpredictable. I feel like I did in the city now all the time--like there's something in the way, something preventing me from getting at my sky. It's worse now, though, because it's the sky that's in the way.

damn your secrets

I was given my choice of superpowers, and I chose the ability to know everyone's secrets. I had been lied to enough. I wanted truth for a change. There wasn't even a specific truth I wanted to unveil--I just wanted to live in a more honest world.

To my great regret, I was granted my wish.

It's not that everyone has secrets that are really best kept buried--though certainly most people do. I could cope with that. I'm used to terrible things. No, it's all these tiny little secrets--the ones nobody knows about, even the bearers of those secrets. They're insignificant things that weren't even worth keeping or remembering, so they're forgotten.

Or they would be, but now there's me. Every time I see someone I'm flooded with these secrets. I know all the things people will never find out. There's no room for thought anymore. Suddenly the entirety of everyone was laid bare to me. Everything beautiful and terrible and ugly and desperate and alive about someone flooded my brain in an instant. Just seeing someone--anyone--was almost too much to bear. I even broke down a couple times. I haven't left my room in days.

I understand now that it's not just that everyone has secrets. We're made of them. We don't even know about them, but we're made of them. And maybe even that would be okay, maybe I could live with that, but the worst part of it is I can see everyone's but my own. I'm sure it's just a quirk of how my gift works, but I can't help the fear that maybe it's simply because I, alone of all men, have no secrets to share.

endless

There's a sinister little apartment complex hidden away a few blocks from here. It's in a place where you don't really expect there to be anything, so most people don't know it's there. I only knew it was there because someone mentioned it once--and eventually I went to visit.

There's a strange iron gate that doesn't seem to lock guarding the too-perfect courtyard--and once it clanged shut behind me I felt not so much trapped as enclosed. The door to the lobby similarly doesn't seem to lock. Inside is an endless maze of hallways. At first I thought maybe it's normal, just some strange design--no doubt the residents get used to it. But the further in I wandered the more it seemed that these identical hallways were actually endless.

I knocked on the door of one of the apartments, and stood outside and stared down the hall, wondering if it was an end I could see, or just some trick of the building. There was that, too: the building seemed impossibly quiet, and the longer I spent in its corridors the less I trusted my senses. It was toying with me.

A resident answered the door. She looked perfectly normal, or at least real--not at all like the malevolent ghosts I expected to be living here. I muttered something about having the wrong door and hurried off, hoping the exit would still be where I left it.

haunted house

When I was a kid, there was a haunted house at the end of my street, and we'd dare each other to run up to it and touch the side. So much fear went into those little rituals--the rest of us standing at the sidewalk, as far as we could stand without actually being in the street, or too far to see.

"Did you do it?" we'd ask when our unfortunate comrade returned, invariably panting--was it from running, or was it from fear? They'd nod. They couldn't talk. Sometimes when it was me, I'd say that I heard noises coming from inside. Some of my friends thought I was lying. To the rest, this made me much cooler. Encouraged, I kept telling these stories. And somewhere down the line, I started believing them--or at least wishing they were true.

My friends all grew out of it, but not me. I stayed on that street. At nights I'd sneak out and go to the house, and sit inside. I'd swear I could hear or feel a ghost there. It was secret, sacred, mine. Throughout high school I only ever told a few people about it. Mostly they didn't understand, so eventually I stopped. I knew it was just for me.

I moved off for college, and discovered it had been destroyed when I came back. They'd built a spec house in its place, all soulless and generic. I broke into it, but there was nothing there. So I started exploring lost and abandoned places, looking for my ghost. Sometimes I thought maybe I'd found it, but the feeling was fleeting. Some of the ghosts out there didn't like my searching.

But I kept on. We had something, and I wasn't going to give that up.

ballad of a thin man

My girlfriend was the first to notice that I was getting thinner--or the first to comment, anyway. I hadn't changed any of my exercise or eating habits, so this was a strange development, but I figured that our metabolisms change as we get older. It might be nothing. But I kept getting thinner.

It was slow at first. I didn't weigh myself but you had to be really paying attention to notice as my face slowly got more gaunt, as my waistline dwindled. I had to buy new belts, then new pants. But even that could have been explained normally--but it kept getting worse. I found that I was hungry all the time, no matter how much I ate.

It only got worse as time wore. I couldn't afford to eat enough to sustain myself--if that was even possible--so I just started to diminish. There isn't really a better word for it. Eventually I was too ashamed to go out in public, or even to let anyone I knew see me. I sealed myself away and admitted defeat. Much later, I wondered if there would be anything left when they came to collect my remains.