Forlorn, a foal in a cheap two-piece suit. You’re a baby, and then you’re an ancient. You’re a pink tear, glistening like Venus, sliding down the glass, drop-shaped and delicate, until you’re a tear in the paper, irreparable, needy, marring a tower of manuscripts in your brokenness. You’re growing potential, then you’re wasted talent.
A square peg in a round hole, forcing the entry until the edges of me are all sawn off. No one is born to be Senior Marketing Manager. No one can manage to reshape the abyss in their image. The knife of life is something sharp and stupid. Wait, what?
Everything sounds right in my head, and then I have to go and say it loud. I hear my own voice echoing through the room and I recoil. Blood on a bullet in a chamber in a gun in a hand. Hand on the gun, outstretched arm aloft in a signal. Get away. Stay away.
It’s not my fault you’re not a frontiersman. It’s not my fault you’re trapped in your own life like a wet-eyed beaver in a newspaper-lined cage. I didn’t descend from on high to save your soul. I didn’t. I didn’t.
Sitting in the tub, wearing a coat of sable fur over my mind. Across from me, perched on the windowsill, the skinned animal. In the living room, toweling off my hair, I stand in the doorway; freeze the frame and the tableau, dismayed, stares back at me. The television, wearing my face, blinks blandly. It says: All my love and desperation to you, stranger. I say: All my contempt, all my sympathy, to you.
If only I could only do those things that enrich me, rather than numb me, if only I could do those things that warp me, rather than dull me, if only I could capture all those rays of light, all those fragments of planets that spin by and graze my fingertips like so many million missed chances.
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