ORGANIZING LIGHT

INTRO

My twenties were largely a waste and if I’m being perfectly honest I never figured I’d make it to thirty. I didn’t make much in the way of memories, they’re all just a mess of events that I can’t really place. I think a lot about this life, this realm; I still wonder how I’m not far off pushing forty and haven’t ended myself. Twenty years of consideration is a lot of consideration.

It pricks a bit, an event that I manage to record because it’s substantial and generally awful. I recall the first girlfriend and subsequent split once the venom had settled into the creases of the earth upon which we stood. The first steps of university well-aware I had no idea what I was doing and worse yet, why I was doing it. The first night out a week after my twenty-first, my stomach and faculties in (what I thought was) ruin. The sickness I feel every time I remember this problem before it flutters off elsewhere to fester and I go back about my business. You’d have to be ill, to be this far along the edge without falling off. I just want to feel something sometimes.

I’ve written these words hundreds, thousands of times even, probably more. They only started to connect once the songs I listened to in my car on drives to and from my girlfriend’s home in my senior year of high school before we tried to kill each other started making my eyes water so many years later, the old caves long-abandoned. That’s day after day I’ve wished away, boxes I just had to check. At some point the progression bites you in the ass and you’re on the infamous downward slope, I can even imagine wanting to get some surgery or treatment over with unaware that that would be the end of me as I mock the daytime television playing in the pre-op station as our numbers are called one at a time and I’m wheeled in my hair having lost its color several administrations ago. That’s every generation’s same struggle, right, that their youth slips away and so much of life is spent revisiting, dreaming? It’s really simple, no one wants to check up on a guy pushing fifty that’s pursuing girls with “teen” at the end of their age. I figure it’s all about what’s relatable and none of these things have ever been relatable no matter how well I grafted words from my skin to the page - the order, the rhythm, it didn’t seem to matter, the memories just had to sit in oak barrels and age, though this wine...this wine will likely taste a lot like piss.

Public service announcement: wherever you’re reading this, wherever it ended up, the words before this were all a prologue for this moment, this moment is what this was written for. I’m already old in my early thirties, I won’t acknowledge that a smartphone is a thing, and in my memories no matter how recent - the phone has a cord even if it really didn’t for most of my life, even in some of the most formative years. Think about every moment planned out that went nowhere, are those the things we think about on our deathbeds and regret as opposed to going the free spirit route? If you’re “fortunate” enough to live out your days you too may own a deathbed. It might be the one you pick out with your wife at the wholesale outlet on a Saturday around the end of winter when the cherry blossoms bloom and the streets of the house where I did my last two years of mandatory public education are littered with pink corpses that are all too perfect. If climate change takes anything I’d prefer it take everything useful before those cherry trees because at least they were nice to look at from my window as I longed to escape to another room with a window and a worse view. I remember moving into a literal ghetto and the freedom was a massive upgrade.

Do you remember your first meal as a free adult? I had a breakfast sandwich from Denny’s around midnight and it was glorious; every bit of it. I never tasted better food, even today. Is this all this is? The brief transference of rights to a life of personal responsibility that magically ends upon the reckoning of tragic incompetence followed by a steep decline and large quantities of the sweets no kid ever wanted in their Halloween bag? No wonder I wanted out when I was sixteen, it was much more obvious, how twisted and rotten the carrot at the end of the stick was. Glass half empty and all that, call a spade a spade. “What do you actually want?” I ask myself over and over again. To this day I couldn’t tell you, not because it’s some big secret, but because I never know anymore. It’s changed hundreds of times, thousands maybe, like the words on the page that couldn’t resonate on my best days.

I was in the store with her, not the first girlfriend, this one actually mattered, she was ordering some rice and beans for a cookout and she grabbed me a cold soda. She always spoke the language in the carnes and because I was a guerro the clerk assumed I didn’t understand anything and usually a man, given her warmth, he’d say something disparaging about dating a guerro (because she smiled at him for too long so she must be for sale). They never lasted long, those clerks. We left together. She’d joke if I wore sunglasses and a hoodie that I looked like Ted Kazinsky - because all us white folks look the same. I loved her. Buried bodies in the middle of the night type of love. To where I’ve written her years later to apologize without a word back. She erased herself from planet Earth as far as I’m concerned but is still very much alive, something I admit I’ve done a number of times myself and recanted for a variety of short-sighted reasons all related to chasing money.

She used to play this one song and said it was about me - it was in English. I can’t remember the name or words anymore as I’ve effectively cut the memory from my brain. I’ve heard it once or twice since those days with her and both times I fell ill. The first time was at a small gas station that only took cash near the place I’d buy fresh eggs from a family with backyard chickens and I began to feel like I was being taken to God. It was my nervous system peeling away and ditching my body like an old suit after a funeral, my cells splitting apart but nothing new forming. Sacramento had been the first pocket to experience the heat death of the universe (much earlier than expected). I can’t remember what happened the second time I heard it.

Cecilia, I’ve moved on too. I have only survived with the want to apologize and accept that I may never be able to give it in person. Need this be the apology, this moment, so be it, I’m sorry. I wonder what hurts more, the rejection or seeing someone you lost and their having no memory of you because you were in fact that insignificant? Someone somewhere can surely answer and I wish they would so I could hurry up and avoid diving further into this mess. “Yes, Idiot, it’s way worse to have a former S.O. go all amnesia without head trauma on you, get over yourself and get a life dude, she didn’t like you that much.” The end.

Back to that song.

I called you sweet thing and we listened to that song on the beach in the Marina in and it was cold, far from where you’d called home and I loved your Mother’s home it was the kind of place I’d raise children too even as people marched the streets. Your caramel skin, your dark hair...it was all so comforting to me as we got into my father’s car and we’d taken off, my mother driving like a drunkard. Do you remember? As my sister stumbled the sun hit and on the ride home you were attached to my right arm, my hands at the wheel and I can’t even remember how you got home after if it was because of work or what. My eyes, to this day, water when I hear the notes of that song about the sunlight and I revel in jealousy. They were so young on the cover of the album we looked at it together and it was the easiest way to describe you ten years ago, “sweet thing.” It was ten years ago I felt these things in my blood, my entire body on fire from the inside out and the situation as such, I’d wish it had burned up in the wreckage of “us” because to this day I’d personally rather have burned up in a fire, my skin turned to ash for future generations to caution against and my bones left behind for my family to sort through than survive what was. Every moment after that last moment was a shot to the chest, Cecilia. Every flower that bloomed from that day onward was spitting in my face. I watch the city from my window and can only wonder how much longer it will survive without us. We the fuel of the sun, the universe can obviously do quite well without us, please just...take my hand because I’m scared that I don’t matter. Once we’ve populated galaxy upon galaxy, will any of us really be significant or is it the executive story of the turtle on a post? I just want to cry until I’m dried out and a scarecrow on a fence near the water scaring off the birds that pick at what matters. Perhaps then my existence is more than a boy on a beach holding a woman that couldn’t ever be mine, but probably not.

WELCOME, SO I GUESS I’M ALIVE…AN INTRODUCTION TO ME:

Enoch once told me that Eve, loving Adam, led him from the garden. That paradise was propped up on stilts overlooking Hell. A living flame stood waiting at the gates, watching them march into the rainfall.  The serpent came upon Eve, flowers in her hair and it spoke, that there were agents everywhere, that Lord God’s shadow cast along all but the Tree of Knowledge, that the fruit’s dew struck the ground and gold blossomed. She held the wisdom of kingdoms she’d never see in her hands returned to the only man there ever was and together they partook and it was fire.

Thus the child, pondering, where did I come from? No one came to answer. His olive skin the greatest mystery. He would grow up to kiss the lips of a dead Irish girl, retreating to the mountaintops, reddened snow trails stretching like highways, his sword stained, the blue arc of ice plied through bodies - quenching them, demoncoals in his eyes infected by the lowest pits of the underworld. Those fires burnt the fingertips of the Cherubim guarding the garden once.

And the world below, apes dressed one-another in suits of sheep’s wool. Implants placed throughout the body. Breasts. Rear ends. New hearts. Surgical mimicry merely outpatient. Genetic alterations on the fly. Cellular nanomachines riding nerves to the occipital and temporal lobes like a cowboy on a broken horse, identifying criminals with facial recon piping alerts to the boys in blue in vans along the streets of San Francisco...for the few folks that manage to leave the databank they’re just walking intel, paying the rent on their brand name exo's. They’ll print up new bodies at the sight of a sunburn, a rogue freckle, whiteheads.  Scars will end with the last of the generations that weren’t raised to dismay the bodies they were born to and then death will die as database dumps ghost the willing population piece by piece, every last grain of rice harvested and the animals long gone.