tim!: Working Title 2004 It is a Saturday morning in early September and a record of Paul Simon is playing dutifully on the phonograph. A distinct pain is in my head from last night's drinking experiments. The list of things that need is weighing and the list of things that want is light. The smell of your hair is still on the pillow that I have been using to wrap myself around each night. It's funny, the pillow actually smells better it seems at first that the real scent which used to enter my nose each night as I fell off to that place, that state of escape which is so much better than before. But then I remember the texture of your hair on my face and how this changed everything, if only for the moment. The feel of it and the smell of it was too much to replace with any memory. These are things of desire, of essence of want.
Your drink was coffee, surprisingly black, and not just in the morning, in the moonlight, but all the time, all the year round. I never quite had an understanding of this. What happened to you? It is almost as if I have forgotten. What now, two years gone, but still the thoughts of you are surreal and of yesterday, of dreams and of photographs from a time that is removed from now. This is all different. Reading obituaries right before an automobile begins its centripetal turn is not to be avoided. This leads to other things. You see the oncoming truck complete with eighteen wheels, two and two and sets of four to a row, right at you as the car is turned around at the one-eighty, but only for the moment and then snap back to the front and off to the side and off to safety.
How did you drink coffee in July in North Carolina? It's almost as if the out of doors is hotter than the coffee is. But drank it you did. Time now is slow slow. Three years was yesterday and so was last month. Two years was earlier, but then so much closer somehow. I was just twenty, the best year. All anticipation and hope. I have made my best work and play of saying goodbye. It does not seem enough. Maybe a lifetime must be spent in saying this. I could get to know you from this side maybe better than I did from when you were here.
Summer summer I say goodbye with smiles and I laugh. For Halloween I will be a hero and in costume. I wish to save only the two of us. We will fly off the face of the cliff with cape holding onto each other for dear life, for life itself in all of its moderate boredom and morning delight. This is it isn't it? The wall and your face are both needed for my existence. They are by no means meant to be interchangeable or similar to any degree, and yet, I need them both. Tomorrow is a day like no other, and for this I already cannot wait to see what it has to show me.