Miss Endorphin Euphoria Talking to the Sun on Fire Island (Part 2)
By pearsonj123
- 149 reads
Cognitive disintegration became more and more likely the longer this pattern of sleeping and anhedonia and coasting lasted. It started to manifest as more, though. My perception began swinging between extremes. One moment would be marked by intense colour saturation, the next by dullness; and I was afraid and I missed her all the more because she would have cured me.
I was somewhat reluctant to deal with my deteriorating mental state. Altered perception was not a haze in a bubble in a dream, it was almost feeling. Better still, but unbeknownst to me at the time, it seemed to signal the end of this period of my life that had been dominated by habits and monotony.
An 0600 alarm, Dodge Colt red…no…chestnut rose for sure, ribs, normal walking, normal working, buses, unintentional eavesdropping.
“I just want to know what it feels like to have it, so I know.”
“Depends on the type, I suppose.”
“Testicular.”
“You’re a woman…”
“So?”
“So, I’m fairly certain I’ve never accidentally punted any of your balls when I’ve swung my foot in-between your legs.”
“I can guess what the womanly ones might feel like, though. It’s the ones unique to you lot that scare me.”
“Right, well…I guess it starts off small and dull and evolves into some frustrated absurdity where you’ve got to do exactly what your doctors say so that you might have a chance at living. Probability is against you and doesn’t care about how determined you are or how good you’ve always been or how much you might live for or leave behind.”
And another: “Oh, sorry I’m late. How long have y- “
“Fuck off, Buckley.”
“I’m not leaving.”
“Then I’m not staying.”
“Look…we are who we are. Places don’t change people and people won’t change people. Everything is a lottery. We venture and gamble in everything we do because everything that happens could happen to anyone anyhow. My diagnosis is grow some fucking balls so you can buy yourself a couple pairs of big boy pants and stop listening to that mix you put together for when you want to feel something.”
“I’m not staying.”
And read by one woman to another: “I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz, or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off. I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul.”
My upper lip, I remember, began to bead with sweat.
“I love you as the plant that never blooms but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers; thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance, risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.”
My heart began to race.
“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride; so I love you because I know no other way than this: where I does not exist, nor you, so close that your hand on my chest is my hand, so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.”
At this the lights became brighter, blinding. I stood up, walked to the woman who had burned so viciously through my fog, and in a low voice told her that she would be silent, and she was silent.
Something had sent me reeling. I know I staggered, I know I did so towards the door. I hadn’t felt something so definite since she left and I began my escape into problem-answer. Quite ordinarily I recall seeing Miss Endorphin Euphoria distorting the features of an unsuspecting passer-by. Unlike the other times I had seen her, though, disorientation compelled me to pursue. An urge to close my hands around her neck and bite into her throat were thrust aside. She must have seen, though, that a want to drink her blood had been momentarily etched on my face, and a touch on her shoulder was met with the back of a hand to my jaw, then one to my temple.
I staggered on, festinating more than anything, as was my way, but now trying urgently to find once more my land legs. That slap had added to the something that sent me reeling. The sky grew bluer and the pavement felt more solid under my feet. There was no blood coming from my mouth, but I heard dripping and felt a great volume of liquid sloshing back and forth as on a boat that has taken on water and is riding the swell of the ocean. There was an oozing in my right ear. I worried that I had somehow perforated an eardrum, but there was no pain and in fact sounds were clearer, crisper, and coated with a meaning and depth that felt friendly and vaguely familiar. I shook and slapped my head, consumed by a desperation to be rid of the sensation and to discern its cause. It wasn’t concussion, or a tension or sinus headache, or a dental problem, I’d had all of these before.
As sudden as the slap that had brought on the feeling, there was a relief from the pressure. I looked down to see a small, iridescent smudge at my feet, like water mixed with oil. Yet within I saw a flash of ginger hair, and fingers playing an imaginary piano for practice, and a woman’s face with high cheekbones on a blue 12-inch album cover, and I heard a true account of talking to the sun on fire island. I stepped on the smudge and walked away, no longer staggering, feeling unshackled. I drew an imaginary rifle, sighted the passer-by whose blood I’d needed, and I held my breath and made sure of my aim so that I might make sure of my freedom and let fly a shot, hitting the point where her brainstem met her spinal cord, and I swear I heard the bullet smack. I grew from festinating into an assured stride and my sense of freedom grew in tandem.
On that day I felt desire once more. Not a desire for her, but to stand still and breathe in all the air there was to breathe in. A desire to walk up behind a horse because I had always been told not to; to turn up in Devon in the last week of March with a Purdey .375-bore bolt-action rifle and plug a Red Deer; to see, smell, and experience the circus and the bullfights and the protests and the wars and the peace.
Not until now did I realise what had occurred. I had, when my monotony and my problem-answer were shattered by that woman reading and that woman slapping, quite unintentionally realised the accidental nature of the world. I had decided that living in a search for meaning was better than embodying meaninglessness. I was not the same as I had been before her, or during her. I was better, and since then I have been content in the knowledge that I have never had another like her, and that she will never have known another man like me.
My life has not been entirely without worry post-recovery however. It would not have been right for it to be so, for all who have experienced love proper, that word remade unique with each one of us poor souls who feel it bite, will and should be marked by it somehow. She no longer consumed all of my thoughts and I would have to purposely think of her to think of her at all; so, I did worry and I do worry still that thinking about her on purpose might leave me unable to remember how she looks. Turns out that she remains, now, a happy memory to be recalled whenever I wish, a happy memory that brings something like a smile to my face still, free from bitterness.
When I drunkenly attempted to cool out my bedroom floor with a few straight rights, months after the pressure in my head had been relieved, I was left with a fractured fourth metacarpal and dislocated fifth metacarpal joint. Both needed surgical fixation by three Kirschner wires. A quick turn-around meant that soon enough I was asked, by a fella with a metal stud on the underside of his lower lip surrounded by a silver beard, to think of something positive while he placed the oxygen mask over my face and the anaesthetist injected what into a vein on the back of my intact hand. The studded doctor told me I’d enjoy the sleep if I thought nice things and thought peaceful, and so before my eyes closed my mind flashed to walking hand-in-hand with her along the waters of Spiaggia Sabbie Nere of Vulcano, trailing slightly behind her so that I could plant my feet where hers had been moments before. I awoke 36 minutes later looking worthless but feeling a million bucks, with metal in my hand and a tranquillity in my chest that was not entirely due to the compounds flowing through me. Memory of her was not me but was mine. Mine to do with as I deemed necessary or unnecessary.
*
This was all my truth of one part of my life and of my love for one woman in that life. She was most this and most that and it may seem somewhat that this love was fed me deliberately to poison my mind and body and soul but that’s not how it went. At all. These musings are not a recipe for womanising nor an invocation towards a tendency to prefer relationships over casual encounters, and although they are concerned with a certain individual they are addressed to whomever they resonate with, and they will resonate with many since many will have driven another or been driven by another to contemplation in the order described above. There are no particularly important lessons to be learnt here save that, I suppose, if two people care about each other more than they do themselves then they’ll argue or have an experience of problem, answer, immersion, failure, disintegration, pressure and its release when their counterpart leaves. You will be marked with a hollowness in the chest or flecks of knowing in either iris, but you will be better for it. Attempts to saturate one’s life with whichever methods of preserving loneliness and habits that keep up appearances are natural and harsh and they wear you down, but they are transient and necessary, and once overcome result in a sharper perception of one’s surroundings and a stable appreciation of what each has meant to the other.
Read the books and look at the sunsets and the sunrises and the art and the nature, it’s a good thing to do and it fills you up, just, if you favour your right, hit with your left.
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