Every couple of seconds there’s a metal “koklunk” sound that reaches the 3^rd story window, attempting valiantly to keep the brisk fall morning at bay.  It’s probably some metal plank on the exit off the nearby highway, and its driving me nuts as my mind slowly unfogs from its restless sleep and I grudgingly become a being.  The words SLEEP and ESCAPISM are on my mind.

The room – askew the way youth doggedly loafs. Pillows where they shouldn’t be – on the slightly sticky floor, cups of alcohol on bookshelves, tables, laptops.  I lay on my back, trying to imagine the air I suck through my nostrils as a thick atmosphere, my cilia straining its mass like baleen.  The light shines directly on my closed eyelids.  Time slips out of relevance, a hop-scotch amidst a mad endless playground. “KOKLUNK.”   Fuckputain, I groan…I think I’m still in love.

“Hey sweetness, how you doing?” She doesn’t respond. “Mmm? that pretty face don’t match that nasty attitude.” A pause, a laugh. Looking left and right at the empty busstop, the N24. Is he worth it? “Listen, can I tell you something?  You’ve got a beautiful ass, and great tits too.” She raises an eyebrow and looks decidedly otherwhere.  “…and I’m sure in between,” he continues triumphantly “you’ve got a heart of gold!”  Confusion. What? Il assure pas flashes like a silverfish.

“Too much? Too much.  Ok. Ok.  Hi!  Yves. I was thinking this.  Don’t laugh, don’t, let me be honest with you.  If we were poor, and I were blind, and you had to lead me everywhere so we could beg, do you think at the end of each day we could be happy?”  Silence. Eyes finally meet.  Gaze held.  He says slowly, for emphasis “would we still have great, happy sex?” Bells chime, a church somewhere, the empty vastness of a Sunday morning in Paris, swooning gulls.

She turns to leave. He laughs, chases.  “Wait, wait! Here.” He gave her a note. It was warm, shiny, oily, exciting. He smiled, large, big, a queerness at the edge, as he in turn pivoted and sped off, literally at a jog, that left a vacuum.  It was brief, it was grossier, it was moins que rien, but he looked her in the eyes the whole time.  She is marked, later, in her own home.  She looks at the note in her hand, feels its weight.  Small decisions, infinite probabilities coalescing around the structures of meaning we assign, as abstract as math and real as penitentiary steel.  Don’t open the note, or else the universe will be disturbed.  Disturb! Disturb! I screamed, sprinting, sprinting, faster and faster, a blur, vertigo.

“KoKLONK” It’s a mountaintop.  It’s a backseat.  It’s a hand held in a hand.  We spend our entire lives as stories with the settings running like scripts at the background of our frothing neurons, and I think it’s safe to say we all search for someone who has been forged so that no matter the position, you find yourselves peering straight through, into the past and the future – alignment. Un soupir. Love.  Is it real? Of course, and it bears repeating.   Cultivate love.  Venerate the good.  Drink champagne. Eat the world.