You’re always off and away in the airy confines of your skull, like a sparrow trapped in the tiniest cage—that keeps burrowing deeper into the subatomic field in its effort to escape this unfortunate cage—and in general always searching for another crack to crawl into within that fifth wall delineates the back end of your brain. You got hands behind this aforementioned backdrop of your mental operating theater and they’re messing around with the flickering remnants of your dreams while your one sweetest hope is just to see the light over the hilltop at the end of this long night. You erotic ornithologist you.
Because here you are flying, but where you flying to? What sun are you angling your wings towards, my pet? When here your lungs burn from breathing in all these freshly brewed carcinogens and your hands ache from holding on to things best left where you found them—in all those unforgotten yesterdays—from before this particular instant and its many evaporating limbs.
Limbs herein meaning the parts that twist off of you while you walk through your day. Sort of like that sparrow I mentioned previous, except that thing of it is that you got so many sparrows inside of your head and they’re all burrowing in different directions at once, and sometimes you see them and sometimes you don’t. But when you catch sight of one flitting through the distant past like it’s the most perfect sunset ever, and you sigh—Yes. That was me, you think—or through an alternate future—or in a make-believe person you believe to be actually your girlfriend’s mind. It’s all just the same story being played on different instruments. Not unlike these many articles of mine. The scene, same old moonlight. The time, same old June night.
But what am I suggesting here? What strange-bodied description of the universe and our mental place in it am I putting forward? I’ll answer with another question. What if these angled arms of thought like atrophying limbs struggling to hang onto the object of their affection are actually always clinging to themselves? And the more you hold onto those around you the more you hold onto you yourself? Because there is no difference? If there was no difference between us, it could be this way. As in, literally we are the same person if you dig down deep enough.
I know what you’re going to say and you’re right. Of course we are two distinct people. We like different shows. We itch in different spots. We have on different types and styles of clothing. One of us might have on a dab of make-up and a bit of nail varnish and the other not. One of us might suffer from chronic eye cysts while another of us may be all banter and not much else. There’s no way to tell who you are, but somehow I still feel like I can find a song that sings the same in you and me.
But what do you see? Christ crucified on Buddha’s back? A world full of happy accidents and us walked out into this world to live completely and totally within our own minds? Shadows and mirrors and the brightness between?
Well, here’s what I see.
There will come a time in everyone’s life when you are so perfectly happy that you never have to be happy again. Then you will stop being happy, and you will finally truly know what happiness is in the misery to come. Are you flying off into the sun or settling into a quiet afternoon for the rest of your life at that time?
While currently, I’m at the Bel Air diner with a belly full of eggs and dreaming of another time when the brains of the brainiac were well-cooked. Ha ha ha. You laugh, but a cooked brain is like slurping up the entrails of God or feasting in more dimensions than your mind can fathom. It leads to the most special kind of meltdown. Which is also exactly when I decided that all of us are exactly how the good old Buddhists say we are. With a face covered in snot in the streets of New York. With my face twisting to glimpse the sun glinting off the tip of the nearest skyscraper or eyeing a passing pedestrian with the suspicion of a telepath on speed.
If I could have, I would have ended the search right then and started over way back when I made that first wrong step but that’s not how it works. It doesn’t stop no matter how many times you step on the face of your future self in the hopes of pushing off and into another, safer, more ethereal realm. I think I see things right, but it’s always just the same half-assed excuse to escape from you who are filling the world with your spawn and once again off to the ass end of everything.
Which is where I am now that I’ve left the Bel Air diner to get on a plane and fly for some three quarters of a day in search of my future wife, and her many quirks, including a tendency to point out my worst faults with a disingenuous sigh. This is how we love. Others love in other ways. For example, there are some people for whom the dirt porn part of their brain is the same part they love with—at least one old friend I can think of.
We for the most part have a tendency to live in the parts of our insides that are drawn with greater realism than the rest. As if these places have a denser atmosphere, while those others are lighter more fantastical places where the air is difficult to breathe, but no less actual for their unreality. Because the further you venture out into the ever-shifting backdrop and its many wild-hued manifestations, the more difficult the climb back down to the ground where your body resides. It’s like trying to relearn how to walk on earth after spending a decade maneuvering through a gravity-less universe. Everything is that much more difficult.
You see, I fell into the infinite confines inside my head once. And coming out of it took years of sitting on couches and giving everyone the blankest of stares. Except I never came out of it. I still think of words as if these words were mountain ranges and valleys I am currently building on the inside of my cranium. This essay being a perfect example of this. More tunneling within tunnels and through tunnels of words.
But of course things did happen in the past, and these things have funneled me in the direction of the future. My imagination is infinite but also bound, and when I look back now that I’ve made the jump and am back in China, I can clearly see a Boston coated in thick rills of nostalgia. (Like as if my memories of that time are always accompanied by an incessant trilling off stage left.)
Or looking out into the empty night through a train window and wondering when emptiness will be all the rage. Or sitting with my grandmother while she explains to me things I believe I already know while we sip sherry in her musty basement apartment in Pittsburgh. Or my mother’s picking a Penthouse off the counter and saying to the man’s daughter, I think we can just throw this away, shall we? Or sitting on a stoop in Chicago and slurping up a cigarette after the recording’s finished and the breeze is in my hair. Or distracted by the multi-colored clouds above a carnival in Missouri.
Because now I am very definitely in a very tiny apartment I have to myself in the town of Yanjiao. And just east of Beijing—where a woman lives who I have not yet seen but who I hope to see soon. And playing patty cake with my anxiety all throughout the night and into the next day.
It’s a nice enough place.
When I think of the many apartments I’ve lived in and around China, I always think of the bathrooms first, and this one is distinctive like the rest. There’s an antechamber with a sink and a tiny R2D2-sized washing machine nestled up against it with its hosing attached to the pipes below said sink. Then the sort of door you’d imagine on the front of a building. With six rectangular panes of sparkolite glass embedded in the flimsy blonde wood, and on the other side a cube-shaped room with a toilet in one corner and pvc piping next to it going from tiled floor to tiled ceiling and stained in long streaks of brown, a water heater bolted near the top of the tiled wall that’s furthest from the door, and a circular fluorescent above. My soul has become different because when I need to go to the bathroom, it’s this bathroom I go to.
And when I’m not in that aforementioned bathroom, it’s all murmuring in corners. Doing push-ups and sit-ups with legs brased against the pleather of the cheap couch in the sitting area of my tiny apartment—like I’m some ex-Navy Seal training to get back at the Russian Mafia for stealing my life from me. Point being, I never grew up. Which also has something to do with falling into the infinite fantasy.
You keep waiting to hit rock bottom, when fact is we all jump out of that plane the first day we’re born, and spend the rest of our lives careening towards the landscape below, but as it grows from being a postage stamp caught in glimpses through the gauze of cloud cover to an ever present and more detailed picture of our immanent ending, we begin to become pre-occupied. Unless of course you spend the whole ride down daydreaming. Which is my own particular problem.
Witness your dirt porn mind erupting to fill the sky with its clouds of soft-bodied black flies. They want to eat you up but they haven’t built a big enough mouth yet. Which is why your dirt porn mind is the mind you love with—at the end of this tattered newspaper corridor. Face your dead self head-on, and your children will be flying before they’re born. They’ll have eyes like lines always unraveling inward. They’ll be bright creations.
Least that’s what I tell myself. But there are times when the things I tell myself become like a white noise that keeps me crouching and ready for anything except for what’s happening right in front of the scablike face. Point being, you can’t trust the things you tell yourself no matter how pretty they look. Pretty words are like pretty dresses. They’re only as good as what’s underneath.
So bow down, kid. Because this isn’t the game you thought it was. It’s a different kind of game. The ones you love are waiting for you to get up and walk on your own so you can walk with them. They’re like, Can you get up, please? You’re ruining your future with these antics of yours. It’s like a game of peek-a-boo in which when you pop your head out to grin at one, you’re running from some other one. Why can’t you accept that life is like that? Can you love everyone at once and equally? And also—the tunneling within tunnels and through tunnels of words. You’re hiding, but hiding from what?
I’ve made up a whole lot of names for what I’m hiding from.
Four-dimensional centipede. Multi-dimensional carnivorous vegetation. Squids. People. Half-spoken thoughts. Things I couldn’t think at all.
But why couldn’t I think them? Because they don’t exist? Is it possible the things I believe I am hiding from are actually the things that keep me hidden? The suction cup of fantasy always dragging a person back into their brain and away from the outside world and the people that fill it? Or ways of describing myself and this is what I’m hiding from? That I am a four-dimensional centipede and multi-dimensional carnivorous vegetation also known as squids, and am these people as well as myself, and am certainly these half-spoken thoughts, as well as also thoughts I haven’t thought, and no thought at all, and I think that someday I’ll be this person who is all these things, but for right now I just want another beer and to very much think the more mundane everyday thoughts I am thinking, and in general be a prisoner here when I could be out trolling the streets?
It’s like how you don’t want to deal with some irritating paperwork. Procrastination. You procrastinate and hope that something’ll just happen, and you won’t have to do this hard and inconvenient thing, that might involve giving a sponge bath to an incontinent individual or rushing back to the love of your life on the far side of the globe, but even more frustrating is that even when you do these awkward and difficult things, still nothing happens. There is nothing happening right now. And this nothing that’s happening always and everywhere is what’s killing me, but it’s also the only way to live something other than a half-lived life. To see that your life is full of a whole hell of a lot of nothing, and to try to live in the most nothingest part, maybe even start a family there. Why not? You can do anything when you’re nothing.
I can see it so clearly, but what I’m seeing, is like a sentence that ends where it begins. I can never get to the end of this sentence. It keeps winding its way back to its starting point.
While you—you got some things you wanted to say. You also believe it’s time to fly out of your own head and see the sights for what they are. As in, you also want to fly off to the ass end of everything and to always be broken like a strand of protein winding itself into a new miniskirt-wearing masterpiece version of the old evolutionary standard. That the women and men of our world are an ever-changing breed, but how are we changing? We can change how we want. So be careful what you wish for!
But also that you and me were always meant to walk through that wall of fire, babe, because thing of it is that you can confuse yourself all you want—with your many words and their various ramifications—but when the moment comes, the right answer just sits there like a hot wad of anxiety inside the larger amphitheater of the belly telling you daily that this is the thing you need to do. All this thinking that’s going on right here is only yet another example of you always trying to avoid seeing what you so obviously must do.
Armageddon may be right around the corner like everyone wants to believe it is, but what is Armageddon but just a change of scenery and maybe it’ll be all haunting greens and alluring blues in the sceneries of tomorrow, or it could be that pink is the new black is the new black is the new black until the world’s been painted red in the blood of the innocent several times over and maybe just that people have turned into the rats of the world and the only things left to serve as stewards of the earth are the cockroaches we leave behind.
Maybe I’m just a charlatan saying all the things you’re supposed to say with the hope that if I say enough true-sounding things, I’ll find out how to truly live? On it goes, with the same roundabout discussion in the back of the brain between the part that says, There is a known thing, and I know this thing, and the part that says, I know nothing, and I’m so glad that I do.
I know that I love you, Grace.
And that saying you love someone is like planting a seed, not every time does it grow into a tree. And that I am currently alive, whether I like it or not.
Yanjiao, China, 2013
Gabriel Boyer has been making up stories about himself for as long as he can remember. There was never a time he was not fully seated in his various delusions. He continues to delude himself daily. His latest release is below. You can read more about him here.
