hallelujah

this is an open letter

If nothing else,
remember that when you were 20,
you loved lying down in the shower and having the hot water rain on you like an anchored boat in the ocean.
You loved driving at night (not necessarily with any destination in mind) and looking into all of the windows in the countryside that kept you out, that kept love in, that still kept you out.
You loved reading books in bed that took you to Spain, Montauk, Poland, or into conversations where you could listen like a fly on the wall.
You loved sleeping a lot, but not because you were lazy, but because you loved your dreams, as abstract as Dali, as sanguine as Renoir, as dramatic as Scorsese.
You always thought about the future.
You thought a lot about who you’d be friends with in 20 years, who you’d be sleeping next to in 20 years, where you’d spend christmas in 20 years, what you’d be doing in 20 years. You were so neurotic about these things when you knew deep down that you would be okay.
It isn’t going to slow down.
It isn’t going to get any easier.
You’re going to wonder what you did with all of your time.
Between 2010-2015. From 2006-2013. You’ll forget most of it.
But in the dashes between all of the years, in every ellipsis, after every comma, life happened, and it was good.
Period.

“I’ve a great idea” said a man
once.
“We should take love and
put it on
billboards, posters, stickers, advertisements,
women’s underwear but not men’s underwear,
cosmetics, pajama sets and
television.
We could have radio songs
about how fortunate it is
when two collide,
how miserable life is without it,
how pointless our
haircuts are,
if not done for love’s sake,
if not to
better our love life…”
Murmurs of agreement engrossed the edges of the room, as dollar signs danced in everybody’s heads.

“But
I don’t want to be on posters, or in songs”
deliberated love from a tiny seat at the table.
“I want to stay a mystery.
I want to stay in the caverns of self actualized souls.
I am not in the mirror,
or the sticker,
or the car stereo.  
I am under the covers.
I am in the blood.  
I am in the language of
the words spoken by those
who
are confident they have found me and kept me inside,
who only let me out at night,
in embraces or in sobs.
Please just let me stay.”

“We’ve conducted our most thorough
market research yet” said the man, coldly.
“You are the most sought after
product
that we have ever come across.”

“I’m not made to be congealed…
to be bottled and
embroidered and
lost,”
rebutted love,
feeling caged.
“I want to stay organic, forever.
To sell me is to pervert me,
and I’ve no need for
perversions.
I am a process for some and never a product for all.
I sign on no dotted lines.”

But it was too late
for impassioned speeches and
thrill songs
to
convince man otherwise.
Love was already in Times Square,
selling perfumes,
on t-shirts,
in shallow pools of music and choreographed dance
routines.

Eventually love, the once dynamic spark,
the smoothly digested idea,
became a broken and pale shade,
numbed unnaturally
by
soft drinks and soundtracks and Viagara.

For a bit of history,
love had once been a wood grain,
a beautiful soul tree,
and now existed as a cold concrete edifice,
an impenetrable illusion,
an island, sunk in the sea
or encircled by an impassable moat.

“Now…

how can we sell sadness?”

a brief bedtime conversation with myself

tb: Well my love, it’s getting late…let’s try and get some sleep. After all, sleep is when we are the most interesting. 

tb: I hate it when you sleep. I just sit there and wait for you to wake up. Why do you sleep so much? What are you afraid of? You’re afraid of telling people your first wet dream was about a Native American girl going down on you in a plummeting elevator, aren’t you?
tb: Yes, of course I am, but only because I don’t know what it means yet. Everybody is afraid of what they don’t already know. 

tb: We should try not to be. When you wake up I don’t want you to be afraid anymore. Please don’t be afraid. Do you remember the first time you stood up? 

tb: As a child? How could I possibly remember that? No…I don’t think I can recall.
tb: It was the bravest I’ve ever seen you.  
tb: What about that hospital gurney in ‘08? I took a few deep breaths and went into the operating room. I had just read John Knowles’ A Separate Peace and thought that dying from shattered femurs was pretty commonplace…although I was very doped up. 
Weren’t you there then?
tb: Do you see the irony in asking your conscience whether it was present while you were doped up? 
tb: Maybe I do and maybe I don’t.
tb: I wasn’t there, no. 

tb: I thought I was going to die and I wasn’t afraid. Isn’t that what bravery is? 

tb: Not fearing death has nothing to do with bravery. Death frees us all. We should look forward to it actually. 
tb: Look forward to it? What exactly is death? And where do you even go when I sleep? 
tb: I’ll try to explain this in the simplest of terms: death takes place in the negative space that life’s energy does not need nor require. Everything that death is, life is not. Do you follow? It is very similar to the relationship a hole has with whatever space fills it. The hole is the absence. Death is the hole. Technically, the hole does not exist except for the space that would fill it, were it not destined to be a hole. Life needs death, and death needs life too. And it’s hard for me to explain where I skip off to when you’re asleep. It’s between time and consciousness. It’s sort of orange-ish, and very pleasant. You’ll visit eventually. 
tb: Have you ever been anyone else’s conscience? I mean like the voice in somebody’s head. Anyone I would know? 

tb: Yes…I once convinced a 19-year-old Benjamin Franklin he would die young in London.
tb: Yeah? What’d he do when you told him?
tb: He planned his first trip.
tb: Did that really happen?

tb: No. Would another joke help?
tb: Sure.
tb: What do you call somebody who is so afraid of death, that they make no future plans and have no prospects or self worth?
tb: What?
tb: A domestic terrorist. Are you asleep yet? 

tb: No. But I’ll be there soon. 

tb: Don’t be afraid.
tb: Goodnight.

tb: Goodnight.