Corbett's Dream

I couldn't see you if you were there, which you weren't, you couldn't have been. I would've made you out somewhere, recognized one of your immutable features- the black specks of dirt and dander caught in the salt-smelling grease of your hairline, or the tired, yellow sags around your eyes. I would've seen you. And I would've tried to move against it, or make sound, or attempted in any way to make you aware of my presence, to press on you the burdensome awkwardness of my companionship, all I have. But nothing is present there, nothing hot or sharp or trebly or sour. All is mute, exhausted, brilliant in overpowering dullness and fatigue. So we were both there, but with no movement, or color, or life. You were a little farther off but even your luminescence was lost, blotted out cruelly by the ether. Our faces were stolid, unmoved, and we stared at each other for all-time in the blank uniformity; our jaws not broken but set securely shut, and neither of us even tried to choke for air. I think I could've wanted to say something to you, but couldn't find words capable of piercing it, and besides, my mind was blank.

We can't go on like this. This isn't how the world was made and it's not how the species should be propagated and if it is I can see why we we're left with nothing but glassy eyed dolts and a meaningless and blistering rage that voluntarily snuffs itself out after meeting the inevitable answer of it's own cold singularity. We have to be a part of it. To try and unearth something, anything at all, or just something to show for it. At least make even the vaguest and most juvenile attempt to strike out at something-to internalize anything meaningful-to justify violence and selfishness and malice and a boiling point of frustration/impotence as anything fruitious which any jackass walking down the street knows isn't. But I can't even distinguish your features in the white out, much less find my own and animate them. The malaise around us has grown too thick, past the point of being ethereal, coagulated long ago into something stickier than glue and denser than lead and more noxious than sulfur. And it doesn't matter anyway because we haven't even the will to stir in it or the cognitive processes which would drive us to do so.

I'm sorry. I can't even move anymore. I can't fuck. I can barely pivot my pelvis. I drink too much and don't think. I can't do drugs because I don't have the fortitude to even marginally threaten my precious lull-sense of non-being. I'm scared, but I don't move. I'm not nervous, but I smoke too much. I've gotten fat again. I can't scream or ride a bike without losing all my air. I can't fathom approaching the frontier of real confusion, because I can't even conceptualize it anymore, even though I thought I made my bones there.

I'd like to sometime imagine a future with you. To take you to the mountains of Pilio and live there cut against the sharp rocks and be leathered by the sun, as naked and brown and ugly and true as was ever intended. But I can't. The heat would give me migraines and I wouldn't be able to concentrate and you wouldn't want the salt breeze blowing in your face all day and stinging your already-downturned eyes.

So we have to remain here, divorced in unity by this infatigable malaise, not daring to move, or digest it, but sit still, in silence; and know that if I were capable of actual human emotion, or knew what such a thing was, I would do my best to try to make an effort to love you.