6.

He would wake many mornings, congested and in a cold sweat, with the women who’d left him on his mind. He woke to the jealous alarms that set his heart beating, his thoughts racing toward their own ends and his soul or sense of purpose ill at ease.

He’d watch the locks of one woman’s waving brown hair tumble over his vision and conceive his state of helpless dispossession when his eyes turned toward her other men. He set himself contrariwise to them, the couplings, and would continually burn himself with questions – why this why that – at times turning against his own sense of masculinity, growing scared of the possibilities of inadequacy.

Thus by the time he opened his eyes and stared out the windows that surrounded his bed, windows full of white, he would have become unable to see a hope or grace in the rays of morning light that kissed different parts of his body. Instead, he felt the absence of her caress, of her form both soft and firm beside him, of the sounds of her breathing, her smell. And in the throes of jealousy he correlated his own pleasure to the pleasures of another, his own sensations to those of another man and felt cheated, hateful, disconcerted.

He was then both parallel and perpendicular to the world, and to himself. He gripped his wood and began to masturbate. The vision of snowladen spruce boughs he’d watched swaying in a light breeze presented him with only lack and loss, the death of possibility, of lifetime, of another life, of his death.

He remembered all these things he didn’t know again, remembered what life would be like that day, again: Locked up in the mind that is confusion, shackled to his frontal lobe, another day, blunderingly misguided, removed from the array of material that would be his life, misunderstanding, forgetting to see what remained at his fingertips – remnants of every color and cut, every texture and vibration, what remained – the wet world, imbued with sensibility, where he again found no sense, none at all, not in the gravelly spring voices or tumbling words.

Their ambivalence, as soft as frosted glass – he would find not people in their faces, in their carefully sauntering gates, in the heavy smoke of immaterial relations – phantoms – the rocks’ heavy and unfeeling hands, statuesque, nonmoving gestures. He remembered he would be lost in the city itself, where all life accelerates and stops at every moment’s unrealized notice.

In the cineplex of the world’s dissociated power – the chapel of hope – she swirled around him, spun, permeating his senses – every one – rippling like tides and ribbons and horseflesh under his hands. The women always melted into age, and their men froze. Brutal and stiff as marble.

The sun that would wash his skin some day, beer bottles, empty vessels, folded papers, papers folded many times – he saw day in the light – through the pupils of the dilated world – through the eyes of the weird gull who’d hovered, black, over the orange iris of the moon. That night, that night, the open eyes of space. He thought, “My life is a waste.”

Staring at the white stain on his dark sheets, he wondered, “How does the sun imagine shadow?”
“It’s the nonexistence of myself. And like every human on earth, I glimpse
that nonity when I stare into enveloping night and imagine my soul’s great
flares, subductions of masslessness expanding, expanding, imagining the
incorporeal mass of God of which, after all, I am part.”
And thinking like this, he sensed his own translucence. Endorphins popping like sugar crystals in his brain, he knew he did not exist in space as anything but space. Invigorated and inconsolable, he pulled himself from bed and descended into another yesterday.

And in light of that old future, he thought of the sun passing over its own shadows, never seeing a single one of them. Her eyes were closed. Who would want to emit that energy, not blinding herself but washing the world out with an undifferentiated abundance of reflection – a world of reflected existence?