Commare

When you blur through life staring down the bottom of a glass, reality fades, what once made sense as common, logical, or ideal suddenly becomes a mountain of rue or an ocean of sorrow. Too much time had elapsed since I'd seen her; I started doubting what she looks like, which, before my choice to crawl inside a bottle, would've been impossible, it was one of the things my eidetic memory wouldn't let me forget. I could still smell the over-the-top sun tan lotion glazing her perfect body and taste the overpriced stale martinis she loved sipping on. It'd been so long since I felt her warmth that not even this hell was hot enough for me; if only things were that simple. In a town full of drunks, dolled-up bimbos, bros, poseurs and bullshit artists, I was the floorshow, trying to drink her away at the end of the bar like some grumpy old man who’d been to war and returned a changed man; some wars are fought on the inside. 

It wouldn't be the first time I’d come to with a migraine long after the party had decayed. She was missing, my vision glided to eternal focus as I meagerly searched for her essence, it took a while before I realized she was already gone. I lapsed time, lost track of it, it was like needing a bottle of wake-up scotch after a 4-day bender to floor you to reality. When all you’re left with is questions, your only choice is to go with your gut, and my gut was telling me she'd have the answers, answers I'd wish I'd never get soon enough. Simple human nature: might as well burn up in the blazing sun than freeze under the cold moon. 

A history of irascibility and a sullen isolation of anything lacking her touch, I ran around like some 90s action hero trying to save ill-fated honeys…it was either a stroke of genius or complete and utter stupidity; I’d decide which later.

I'd been sitting across this bottle of Walker Gold for 45 minutes, or three years depending whom you ask. I didn't ask; I didn't want to know how my existence became less about the things that others live for, and more about the voids that losing such things leaves behind, but I was doing a crappy job of it…

People think time is linear, but the only people who are more wrong than those people are the idiots who believe in some invisible bearded white man in the sky who has foretold their stories in all time, in every single quantum timeline. His tests are stupid-at-best since the concept of such a being must include within it the knowledge of your passing or failing, and if that's true, then why bother with the test in the first place? It'd be like writing a test after you've gotten your grades. Even a simple temporal movement forward would be impossible for this thing; he can’t ever watch the useless seconds tick away when he’s resting, which with the state the world’s in, must be all the time.

It's us that perceives time to move forward, but as experience taught me, time may very well slow down, pause, or rewind altogether; I lived in the past, my feeble perceptions of things remembered were all I knew of life, of death, of lamentations, and the abyss I'd gazed into at the bottom of that same golden bottle. Hume would be impressed, maybe even Kant and Einstein too. Great…there's my noble deed of the day, impressing the nonexistent dead souls of archaic philosophers who knew very little and did even less. Where was I? Oh yes, about to feel golden about myself.

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Eye in Eye; Edvard Munch; 1894; Oil on canvas; 136 x 110 cm; The Munch Museum

Perfect Defects

It’s only one of the seemingly infinite number of fatal flaws we possess, that somewhere, deep in the idling thoughts hinged within our minds, that we can actually fight our nature, change who we are or what we can accomplish, even how we feel. How often did he wish she never existed just so he’d be spared this pain? How many times did he try to forget he ever met her just so he could sleep in peace? To fight your nature is to damn yourself to the Inferno before even embarking on the journey of self-fulfillment. No one could even ponder a guess what went on inside that thick skull of his, perhaps he felt like Alice, stumbling down the rabbit hole in a makeshift classic Inception, or perhaps it was more likely that he identified with the Mad Hatter and his uncanny ability to hide his lunacy from those around him, sipping tea like some British noble.

He fought himself, denied his nature, trying to understand why he felt this way and what she seemed to symbolize in his disturbed psyche. But no matter how contemplative he became or how apparently attached to the idea of her as the chosen one in his ordained tale, he couldn't change how he felt, nor where his thoughts seemed to roam, he simply…became the self-aware consciousness of the thing-in-itself, of becoming. Although he was smart enough to know that this process didn't make any sense, you can never truly understand emotions, they're different sides of different coins, it’d be like trying to drive a goldfish. He started to loathe himself for abandoning his ideals and principles just like that for a minute material object such as another person, but he eventually grew to recognize her as transcendental and complex, rather than physical and meek.

He was afraid that things were not as they appeared and his fear was not misplaced, he would come to realize that he didn't actually love the idea of her—disregarding all her flaws and deluding himself that she was some angel he was meant to be with—but rather, that he loved her because she was flawed…. It was her imperfections that strengthened her character; her broken past that furthered her resolve, and although his past was worse than hers, he came to recognize her as the personification of his own identity, of his reward for the seemingly life of valor he proclaimed to live thitherto. She reflected his strengths, weaknesses, and character. He wondered whether his proceeding generations would realize how bravely he fought, how courageously he thought, or how passionately he loved.

They were no longer two—as in him and her, but one—as in them, becoming extensions of each other, rooting themselves in the other’s tree of life, but it was her that became, quite candidly, the clearest expression of who he was, and who he could become.

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Pablo Picasso, 1907, Head of a Sleeping Woman (Study for Nude with Drapery), oil on canvas, 61.4 x 47.6 cm, The Museum of Modern Art, New York