As I sit on a beige couch and look out my therapist’s window I cannot help to be annoyed by the new age music she plays to get her patients in a mellow mood– like music for infants who have trouble falling asleep. The view is this: hills, the lumps that surround the East Bay, green because it’s spring and clumped with oak trees and other secret spots for deer to hide. The occasional rows of boulders that haven’t moved in ages. What am I doing here? Oh, that’s right, I’m insane. Or, do I merely have issues? I mean, we all have issues. Don’t we?
I guess I could easily fall asleep in here: the lulling, psychotropic music does sort of grow on one, the heat that is much too high, and she is here to finally keep me safe, at least for one hour. See, to BE here means I’m not crazy and she tells me so and I have to believe her, blues irises behind cat’s eye glasses. It’s all that an insane person needs, for a moment. Like a drug that really works.
She dresses in Oriental-esque clothes: a Chinese chemise that has big round buttons on top that she fidgets with. She is a beautiful woman, in her late fifties. Brown hair, a certain lack of sun damage that makes her look forty something. And she’ll listen to me and my nightmares and fantasies. I’m fully aware that this is friendship prostitution and she knows it to. That’s what makes it something less than creepy. What is this therapeutic moment: two people connecting for 59 minutes, I guess. Me hiding my desire; she holding back yawns. It’s a game we play that no one ever really wins.
I’m here because I can’t take it anymore. The economy, the wars, the interpersonal relationships we make that pan out into less than gratifying sex or e-mails that are full of such woe and self-pity they burn the eyes. Because she is a therapist who reads for pleasure and I’m a patient with literary aspirations we synch on some level. We are in some sense one and the same. She listens to my stories, reads popular lit like “More Tales of the City”, I read and write tales of modern urban angst, and we both think we know something about the world out there, where there are constantly sirens and the sounds of people peopling the silence. We know that both of what we do is supposed to actually make a difference but it doesn’t, in the larger scheme of things. Perhaps on some level of a Dante-esque hell what we do matters, but in a culture of instant gratification, a sin we can’t stop sinning, how can we really change anything? Let’s face it: no one ou there can focus more than three minutes. It’s the pop song mentality syndrome.
What we’ll talk about today is always the special on the menu of possibility. I’d be lying if I were to say I’m not here more to pick her brain than resolve anything in mine. For her to be normal or seem normal with all the terrible stories she must hear, the whining and complaints, the verifiable psychoses, and how each time we both trust her ability to dress beautifully, I really do not know how she copes. Trips to a time share in Cabo; a wedding in Copenhagen. When I think of those vignettes, I do not fully get how they could satisfy her inquisitive mind.
I feel like such a whore.
I live in a vast toilet bowl, or, at least, on its fringes. It’s called the Bay of San Francisco and people desperately cling to its seat in their horrible 50s, 60s and 70s style houses (tract) in a belief that this is the promised land. Don’t get me wrong: it’s a beautiful toilet bowl, exquisite mountains and the mirror of the bay. There should be a calendar of beautiful toilet bowls. Liberace must have had a great one or twelve. But this promised land comes with a price that is anywhere from two to ten times the price of living anywhere else, except New York City, in the meaningless puzzle that is America. The truly rich or truly rich wanna-bes live in San Fran herself and on the hills that surround. Think of the Hollywood hills minus the film industry and in its place, the bizness of Hi-Tech anything, and the cut-throat business of money. This is where all the world’s, or much of its, technological crap is produced, marketed, and sold to the sheeple. Look how far technology has advanced us: we can get AIDS or other venereal diseases much more quickly; we can kill people from remote pilot-less drones. We can have anything we want at any time of the day. What a boon. The intimacy we believe we can increase which in the big picture leads to identity theft and affairs and even murder. The electronic fix: it promises so much and delivers so little. Sparks that rarely kindle fires.
So what do we do: we talk about everything and nothing. We text our souls into the oblivion of death or misunderstanding. It’s a sitcom that turns out to be more annoying than comical. It’s an infinite infomercial for something that can never be bought nor sold: contentedness.
Yes, it is true that one is not supposed to fall in love with one’s therapist, but in this day and age, hasn’t love been re-defined? How couldn’t one not fall in love with a rental friend, she who is not a hooker, but a person paid to pretend to care and not offer advice but words that soothe? It’s all about the soothing. A mind masseuse. For one hour in the therapy chamber, a hotel room of sorts, the most intimate details are shared and mulled over. Books, films, art are all discussed. The buzz one gets is something more powerful than any prescribed head meds. Then the time is up. So fast. It’s extended speed dating at its best and the absolute ultimate is that there will be no sex. No sex. Ever.
It’s on a higher level. A church between two. Souls interviewed.
She likes to read and suggests a library with the Babylon that surrounds and is the city. A place with books and films and a clean bathroom. A spot where Hemingway’s old man from “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” would feel comfortable if even for just a moment.
“Prince of the Tides” is the book she recommended and since it was written by a San Franciscan and is six hundred pages, it’s more advantageous to rent the film, Depression tires the eyes in reading.
Barbara Streisand as the psychotherapist and Nick Notle as the beau. How perfect is that? No hidden message other than that of unrequited love and the gloomy sense of Romanticism it invokes– the guy who doesn’t get the girl. In the end, there’s an end. It’s as simple as that. Ring around the rosie pocket full of poesies, in the end, we all fall down.
We’ve been seeing each other for months, maybe even close to a year, and it feels like weeks. She takes trips to Scandinavia and the Caribbean and I ask about the details. About the taste of salty fish and how “conch” is really pronounced although I know it’s “conk” and what she thought of those places compared to here. The here that looms outside of the window in its oppressive sunlight and green/yellow hills and buildings that look empty, like blocks of Legos, abandoned by children who have grown into melancholy versions of their parents.
She only tells the tiniest of details as I focus on a photo on the wall: a spider approaching the sweet spot of a flower. She took it herself.
Oh the verge of suicide only in the contemplative sense or utter madness due to the fact that I have burnt all my bridges that I’ve only ever constructed badly and hardly maintained during a life of little value to the outside world. Oh Bartelby if you could have only known what it feels like to have your disposition outlined by the muse of your own psyche. Oh Melville should I not say, how could you have made such a perfect candidate for Prozac?
Now don’t get me wrong– it’s not like I think about her when I’m not in her tiny office with a self-arrayed niche of knick knacks: the only ones I can remember are horses and the fact that she was born in Alaska. It’s only when I’m with her do I sense a feeling of solidarity and that she gets where I’m coming from and that she too also knows she, we, the world and its denizens all have no cure.
As my own lack of progress is aligned to an identity crisis– a move to a big city, past the age of making friends (would that be around the early or late 20s?), I nevertheless take her advice to get on and into the world by attending a local fiction reading at a college just down the few hills I live within although I have no desire to hear or to be seen or to participate in the joy that is social interaction. Surely their stories of suffering cannot equal my own.
Death of father when I was nine, isolation from a large Catholic family as I was the youngest and most despised due to mother’s attention for her little prince and a lifelong trail of missed opportunity due to the fact that making money or being successful has never been a goal of a lonely soul who sees no value in the ownership of material wealth.
So what is one to do with all the hours in a day? And how to admit to her, my confessor, that I am not what the world expects me to be and what I have been since the first day I slit my palm on a rusty slide at the park in which raccoons come out at night to invade the garbage can is a shadow. How does one casually tell another that they are a vampyre? In life: a loser. In the life of the mind: a psychic vampyre who feeds off others’ auras, who nibbles at crumbles of others’ souls. I am a shade and I feed of the energy of others. It is really that simple. I do not exist. The Hindus are right. This is all an illusion.
Ah the last confession. There is a forum out there of which we all know. A computer site I cannot mention by name or risk ridiculous litigation but allows me to say that it is very easy to procure a date.
And I am its daemon.
For fun this is what I do, somewhat professionally. I post an add. Women, I assume, write to me. They are all the same: looking for prince charming, their other half. Some have had lives, have been married, have children they seek to in some way with me get away from, some have not. It’s all so predictable and I guess that is what makes it so additive . . . .
They always write the same things. I want this and this from a man, caring affectionate, must be tall, must have money. It’s an a la carte menu of all they have forsaken in another in life for whatever reasons. They post terrible pictures that highlight their worst features: a crossed eye, to quote a jazz song a figure less than Greek, a hairdo from the early eighties, a shade of lipstick that is the color of Deard Sea mud.
And I prey on them like leach meal. I meet them at cafes or chain coffee houses. We talk of their hopes and aspirations and the possibility that lies ahead. They tell me everything: about their last men, their sexual escapades, how their dreams were shattered, about deaths in the family and I drink it up like an elixir of misery that makes my skin feel electric. It is a hit of schadenfreude that I cannot resist and they want so little in return. An ear that listens, a touch of the hand, someone for once in their life to leave a gracious tip.
We meet, we measure each others’ clothes, bodies, we indulge in fantasy and wonder, and we talk. They do not know I am soaking up their auras, drinking their energy, lapping up their desire and stress and angst. I tell them what they want to hear: how great I am in bed, how I love cleaning the house, that all children should be treated as if they were one’s own. We laugh and joke and sometimes get a little tipsy. We share a cigarette. And then it’s over.
Like the proverbial thief in the night I never contact them again. I become a void, the void that they carry within, the empty space that made them respond to my cleverly crafted ad, and they have only of me a memory. There are so many of these dispossessed souls why meet again? Ah, look at all the lonely people. How the Beatles were so right.
So how does this story end? It really never does. I could tell you that my therapist called, canceling our three o’clock. She has to attend a conference in St. Louis. Touché. I could tell you that she has broken my heart but I would be lying. I could tell you anything you wanted to know and like a fallen angel who just wants to say “I’m sorry” or “fuck you” one last time to his or her God, I will not be there or anywhere and you will feel the great emptiness in which we all live and where I reside. You too like me will become the silence that people drown in after reading a poem.
As I sit on a beige couch and look out my therapist’s window I cannot help to be annoyed by the new age music she plays to get her patients in a mellow mood– like music for infants who have trouble falling asleep. The view is this: hills, the lumps that surround the East Bay, green because it’s spring and clumped with oak trees and other secret spots for deer to hide. The occasional rows of boulders that haven’t moved in ages. What am I doing here? Oh, that’s right, I’m insane. Or, do I merely have issues? I mean, we all have issues. Don’t we?
I guess I could easily fall asleep in here: the lulling, psychotropic music does sort of grow on one, the heat that is much too high, and she is here to finally keep me safe, at least for one hour. See, to BE here means I’m not crazy and she tells me so and I have to believe her, blues irises behind cat’s eye glasses. It’s all that an insane person needs, for a moment. Like a drug that really works.
She dresses in Oriental-esque clothes: a Chinese chemise that has big round buttons on top that she fidgets with. She is a beautiful woman, in her late fifties. Brown hair, a certain lack of sun damage that makes her look forty something. And she’ll listen to me and my nightmares and fantasies. I’m fully aware that this is friendship prostitution and she knows it to. That’s what makes it something less than creepy. What is this therapeutic moment: two people connecting for 59 minutes, I guess. Me hiding my desire; she holding back yawns. It’s a game we play that no one ever really wins.
I’m here because I can’t take it anymore. The economy, the wars, the interpersonal relationships we make that pan out into less than gratifying sex or e-mails that are full of such woe and self-pity they burn the eyes. Because she is a therapist who reads for pleasure and I’m a patient with literary aspirations we synch on some level. We are in some sense one and the same. She listens to my stories, reads popular lit like “More Tales of the City”, I read and write tales of modern urban angst, and we both think we know something about the world out there, where there are constantly sirens and the sounds of people peopling the silence. We know that both of what we do is supposed to actually make a difference but it doesn’t, in the larger scheme of things. Perhaps on some level of a Dante-esque hell what we do matters, but in a culture of instant gratification, a sin we can’t stop sinning, how can we really change anything? Let’s face it: no one ou there can focus more than three minutes. It’s the pop song mentality syndrome.
What we’ll talk about today is always the special on the menu of possibility. I’d be lying if I were to say I’m not here more to pick her brain than resolve anything in mine. For her to be normal or seem normal with all the terrible stories she must hear, the whining and complaints, the verifiable psychoses, and how each time we both trust her ability to dress beautifully, I really do not know how she copes. Trips to a time share in Cabo; a wedding in Copenhagen. When I think of those vignettes, I do not fully get how they could satisfy her inquisitive mind.
I feel like such a whore.
I live in a vast toilet bowl, or, at least, on its fringes. It’s called the Bay of San Francisco and people desperately cling to its seat in their horrible 50s, 60s and 70s style houses (tract) in a belief that this is the promised land. Don’t get me wrong: it’s a beautiful toilet bowl, exquisite mountains and the mirror of the bay. There should be a calendar of beautiful toilet bowls. Liberace must have had a great one or twelve. But this promised land comes with a price that is anywhere from two to ten times the price of living anywhere else, except New York City, in the meaningless puzzle that is America. The truly rich or truly rich wanna-bes live in San Fran herself and on the hills that surround. Think of the Hollywood hills minus the film industry and in its place, the bizness of Hi-Tech anything, and the cut-throat business of money. This is where all the world’s, or much of its, technological crap is produced, marketed, and sold to the sheeple. Look how far technology has advanced us: we can get AIDS or other venereal diseases much more quickly; we can kill people from remote pilot-less drones. We can have anything we want at any time of the day. What a boon. The intimacy we believe we can increase which in the big picture leads to identity theft and affairs and even murder. The electronic fix: it promises so much and delivers so little. Sparks that rarely kindle fires.
So what do we do: we talk about everything and nothing. We text our souls into the oblivion of death or misunderstanding. It’s a sitcom that turns out to be more annoying than comical. It’s an infinite infomercial for something that can never be bought nor sold: contentedness.
Yes, it is true that one is not supposed to fall in love with one’s therapist, but in this day and age, hasn’t love been re-defined? How couldn’t one not fall in love with a rental friend, she who is not a hooker, but a person paid to pretend to care and not offer advice but words that soothe? It’s all about the soothing. A mind masseuse. For one hour in the therapy chamber, a hotel room of sorts, the most intimate details are shared and mulled over. Books, films, art are all discussed. The buzz one gets is something more powerful than any prescribed head meds. Then the time is up. So fast. It’s extended speed dating at its best and the absolute ultimate is that there will be no sex. No sex. Ever.
It’s on a higher level. A church between two. Souls interviewed.
She likes to read and suggests a library with the Babylon that surrounds and is the city. A place with books and films and a clean bathroom. A spot where Hemingway’s old man from “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” would feel comfortable if even for just a moment.
“Prince of the Tides” is the book she recommended and since it was written by a San Franciscan and is six hundred pages, it’s more advantageous to rent the film, Depression tires the eyes in reading.
Barbara Streisand as the psychotherapist and Nick Notle as the beau. How perfect is that? No hidden message other than that of unrequited love and the gloomy sense of Romanticism it invokes– the guy who doesn’t get the girl. In the end, there’s an end. It’s as simple as that. Ring around the rosie pocket full of poesies, in the end, we all fall down.
We’ve been seeing each other for months, maybe even close to a year, and it feels like weeks. She takes trips to Scandinavia and the Caribbean and I ask about the details. About the taste of salty fish and how “conch” is really pronounced although I know it’s “conk” and what she thought of those places compared to here. The here that looms outside of the window in its oppressive sunlight and green/yellow hills and buildings that look empty, like blocks of Legos, abandoned by children who have grown into melancholy versions of their parents.
She only tells the tiniest of details as I focus on a photo on the wall: a spider approaching the sweet spot of a flower. She took it herself.
Oh the verge of suicide only in the contemplative sense or utter madness due to the fact that I have burnt all my bridges that I’ve only ever constructed badly and hardly maintained during a life of little value to the outside world. Oh Bartelby if you could have only known what it feels like to have your disposition outlined by the muse of your own psyche. Oh Melville should I not say, how could you have made such a perfect candidate for Prozac?
Now don’t get me wrong– it’s not like I think about her when I’m not in her tiny office with a self-arrayed niche of knick knacks: the only ones I can remember are horses and the fact that she was born in Alaska. It’s only when I’m with her do I sense a feeling of solidarity and that she gets where I’m coming from and that she too also knows she, we, the world and its denizens all have no cure.
As my own lack of progress is aligned to an identity crisis– a move to a big city, past the age of making friends (would that be around the early or late 20s?), I nevertheless take her advice to get on and into the world by attending a local fiction reading at a college just down the few hills I live within although I have no desire to hear or to be seen or to participate in the joy that is social interaction. Surely their stories of suffering cannot equal my own.
Death of father when I was nine, isolation from a large Catholic family as I was the youngest and most despised due to mother’s attention for her little prince and a lifelong trail of missed opportunity due to the fact that making money or being successful has never been a goal of a lonely soul who sees no value in the ownership of material wealth.
So what is one to do with all the hours in a day? And how to admit to her, my confessor, that I am not what the world expects me to be and what I have been since the first day I slit my palm on a rusty slide at the park in which raccoons come out at night to invade the garbage can is a shadow. How does one casually tell another that they are a vampyre? In life: a loser. In the life of the mind: a psychic vampyre who feeds off others’ auras, who nibbles at crumbles of others’ souls. I am a shade and I feed of the energy of others. It is really that simple. I do not exist. The Hindus are right. This is all an illusion.
Ah the last confession. There is a forum out there of which we all know. A computer site I cannot mention by name or risk ridiculous litigation but allows me to say that it is very easy to procure a date.
And I am its daemon.
For fun this is what I do, somewhat professionally. I post an add. Women, I assume, write to me. They are all the same: looking for prince charming, their other half. Some have had lives, have been married, have children they seek to in some way with me get away from, some have not. It’s all so predictable and I guess that is what makes it so additive . . . .
They always write the same things. I want this and this from a man, caring affectionate, must be tall, must have money. It’s an a la carte menu of all they have forsaken in another in life for whatever reasons. They post terrible pictures that highlight their worst features: a crossed eye, to quote a jazz song a figure less than Greek, a hairdo from the early eighties, a shade of lipstick that is the color of Deard Sea mud.
And I prey on them like leach meal. I meet them at cafes or chain coffee houses. We talk of their hopes and aspirations and the possibility that lies ahead. They tell me everything: about their last men, their sexual escapades, how their dreams were shattered, about deaths in the family and I drink it up like an elixir of misery that makes my skin feel electric. It is a hit of schadenfreude that I cannot resist and they want so little in return. An ear that listens, a touch of the hand, someone for once in their life to leave a gracious tip.
We meet, we measure each others’ clothes, bodies, we indulge in fantasy and wonder, and we talk. They do not know I am soaking up their auras, drinking their energy, lapping up their desire and stress and angst. I tell them what they want to hear: how great I am in bed, how I love cleaning the house, that all children should be treated as if they were one’s own. We laugh and joke and sometimes get a little tipsy. We share a cigarette. And then it’s over.
Like the proverbial thief in the night I never contact them again. I become a void, the void that they carry within, the empty space that made them respond to my cleverly crafted ad, and they have only of me a memory. There are so many of these dispossessed souls why meet again? Ah, look at all the lonely people. How the Beatles were so right.
So how does this story end? It really never does. I could tell you that my therapist called, canceling our three o’clock. She has to attend a conference in St. Louis. Touché. I could tell you that she has broken my heart but I would be lying. I could tell you anything you wanted to know and like a fallen angel who just wants to say “I’m sorry” or “fuck you” one last time to his or her God, I will not be there or anywhere and you will feel the great emptiness in which we all live and where I reside. You too like me will become the silence that people drown in after reading a poem.
Philip Kobylarz’s recent work appears or will appear in Connecticut Review, The Iconoclast, Visions International, New American Writing, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Salzburg Review and has appeared in Best American Poetry. His book, Rues, is forthcoming from Blue Light Press of San Francisco.
As I sit on a beige couch and look out my therapist’s window I cannot help to be annoyed by the new age music she plays to get her patients in a mellow mood– like music for infants who have trouble falling asleep. The view is this: hills, the lumps that surround the East Bay, green because it’s spring and clumped with oak trees and other secret spots for deer to hide. The occasional rows of boulders that haven’t moved in ages. What am I doing here? Oh, that’s right, I’m insane. Or, do I merely have issues? I mean, we all have issues. Don’t we?
I guess I could easily fall asleep in here: the lulling, psychotropic music does sort of grow on one, the heat that is much too high, and she is here to finally keep me safe, at least for one hour. See, to BE here means I’m not crazy and she tells me so and I have to believe her, blues irises behind cat’s eye glasses. It’s all that an insane person needs, for a moment. Like a drug that really works.
She dresses in Oriental-esque clothes: a Chinese chemise that has big round buttons on top that she fidgets with. She is a beautiful woman, in her late fifties. Brown hair, a certain lack of sun damage that makes her look forty something. And she’ll listen to me and my nightmares and fantasies. I’m fully aware that this is friendship prostitution and she knows it to. That’s what makes it something less than creepy. What is this therapeutic moment: two people connecting for 59 minutes, I guess. Me hiding my desire; she holding back yawns. It’s a game we play that no one ever really wins.
I’m here because I can’t take it anymore. The economy, the wars, the interpersonal relationships we make that pan out into less than gratifying sex or e-mails that are full of such woe and self-pity they burn the eyes. Because she is a therapist who reads for pleasure and I’m a patient with literary aspirations we synch on some level. We are in some sense one and the same. She listens to my stories, reads popular lit like “More Tales of the City”, I read and write tales of modern urban angst, and we both think we know something about the world out there, where there are constantly sirens and the sounds of people peopling the silence. We know that both of what we do is supposed to actually make a difference but it doesn’t, in the larger scheme of things. Perhaps on some level of a Dante-esque hell what we do matters, but in a culture of instant gratification, a sin we can’t stop sinning, how can we really change anything? Let’s face it: no one ou there can focus more than three minutes. It’s the pop song mentality syndrome.
What we’ll talk about today is always the special on the menu of possibility. I’d be lying if I were to say I’m not here more to pick her brain than resolve anything in mine. For her to be normal or seem normal with all the terrible stories she must hear, the whining and complaints, the verifiable psychoses, and how each time we both trust her ability to dress beautifully, I really do not know how she copes. Trips to a time share in Cabo; a wedding in Copenhagen. When I think of those vignettes, I do not fully get how they could satisfy her inquisitive mind.
I feel like such a whore.
I live in a vast toilet bowl, or, at least, on its fringes. It’s called the Bay of San Francisco and people desperately cling to its seat in their horrible 50s, 60s and 70s style houses (tract) in a belief that this is the promised land. Don’t get me wrong: it’s a beautiful toilet bowl, exquisite mountains and the mirror of the bay. There should be a calendar of beautiful toilet bowls. Liberace must have had a great one or twelve. But this promised land comes with a price that is anywhere from two to ten times the price of living anywhere else, except New York City, in the meaningless puzzle that is America. The truly rich or truly rich wanna-bes live in San Fran herself and on the hills that surround. Think of the Hollywood hills minus the film industry and in its place, the bizness of Hi-Tech anything, and the cut-throat business of money. This is where all the world’s, or much of its, technological crap is produced, marketed, and sold to the sheeple. Look how far technology has advanced us: we can get AIDS or other venereal diseases much more quickly; we can kill people from remote pilot-less drones. We can have anything we want at any time of the day. What a boon. The intimacy we believe we can increase which in the big picture leads to identity theft and affairs and even murder. The electronic fix: it promises so much and delivers so little. Sparks that rarely kindle fires.
So what do we do: we talk about everything and nothing. We text our souls into the oblivion of death or misunderstanding. It’s a sitcom that turns out to be more annoying than comical. It’s an infinite infomercial for something that can never be bought nor sold: contentedness.
Yes, it is true that one is not supposed to fall in love with one’s therapist, but in this day and age, hasn’t love been re-defined? How couldn’t one not fall in love with a rental friend, she who is not a hooker, but a person paid to pretend to care and not offer advice but words that soothe? It’s all about the soothing. A mind masseuse. For one hour in the therapy chamber, a hotel room of sorts, the most intimate details are shared and mulled over. Books, films, art are all discussed. The buzz one gets is something more powerful than any prescribed head meds. Then the time is up. So fast. It’s extended speed dating at its best and the absolute ultimate is that there will be no sex. No sex. Ever.
It’s on a higher level. A church between two. Souls interviewed.
She likes to read and suggests a library with the Babylon that surrounds and is the city. A place with books and films and a clean bathroom. A spot where Hemingway’s old man from “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” would feel comfortable if even for just a moment.
“Prince of the Tides” is the book she recommended and since it was written by a San Franciscan and is six hundred pages, it’s more advantageous to rent the film, Depression tires the eyes in reading.
Barbara Streisand as the psychotherapist and Nick Notle as the beau. How perfect is that? No hidden message other than that of unrequited love and the gloomy sense of Romanticism it invokes– the guy who doesn’t get the girl. In the end, there’s an end. It’s as simple as that. Ring around the rosie pocket full of poesies, in the end, we all fall down.
We’ve been seeing each other for months, maybe even close to a year, and it feels like weeks. She takes trips to Scandinavia and the Caribbean and I ask about the details. About the taste of salty fish and how “conch” is really pronounced although I know it’s “conk” and what she thought of those places compared to here. The here that looms outside of the window in its oppressive sunlight and green/yellow hills and buildings that look empty, like blocks of Legos, abandoned by children who have grown into melancholy versions of their parents.
She only tells the tiniest of details as I focus on a photo on the wall: a spider approaching the sweet spot of a flower. She took it herself.
Oh the verge of suicide only in the contemplative sense or utter madness due to the fact that I have burnt all my bridges that I’ve only ever constructed badly and hardly maintained during a life of little value to the outside world. Oh Bartelby if you could have only known what it feels like to have your disposition outlined by the muse of your own psyche. Oh Melville should I not say, how could you have made such a perfect candidate for Prozac?
Now don’t get me wrong– it’s not like I think about her when I’m not in her tiny office with a self-arrayed niche of knick knacks: the only ones I can remember are horses and the fact that she was born in Alaska. It’s only when I’m with her do I sense a feeling of solidarity and that she gets where I’m coming from and that she too also knows she, we, the world and its denizens all have no cure.
As my own lack of progress is aligned to an identity crisis– a move to a big city, past the age of making friends (would that be around the early or late 20s?), I nevertheless take her advice to get on and into the world by attending a local fiction reading at a college just down the few hills I live within although I have no desire to hear or to be seen or to participate in the joy that is social interaction. Surely their stories of suffering cannot equal my own.
Death of father when I was nine, isolation from a large Catholic family as I was the youngest and most despised due to mother’s attention for her little prince and a lifelong trail of missed opportunity due to the fact that making money or being successful has never been a goal of a lonely soul who sees no value in the ownership of material wealth.
So what is one to do with all the hours in a day? And how to admit to her, my confessor, that I am not what the world expects me to be and what I have been since the first day I slit my palm on a rusty slide at the park in which raccoons come out at night to invade the garbage can is a shadow. How does one casually tell another that they are a vampyre? In life: a loser. In the life of the mind: a psychic vampyre who feeds off others’ auras, who nibbles at crumbles of others’ souls. I am a shade and I feed of the energy of others. It is really that simple. I do not exist. The Hindus are right. This is all an illusion.
Ah the last confession. There is a forum out there of which we all know. A computer site I cannot mention by name or risk ridiculous litigation but allows me to say that it is very easy to procure a date.
And I am its daemon.
For fun this is what I do, somewhat professionally. I post an add. Women, I assume, write to me. They are all the same: looking for prince charming, their other half. Some have had lives, have been married, have children they seek to in some way with me get away from, some have not. It’s all so predictable and I guess that is what makes it so additive . . . .
They always write the same things. I want this and this from a man, caring affectionate, must be tall, must have money. It’s an a la carte menu of all they have forsaken in another in life for whatever reasons. They post terrible pictures that highlight their worst features: a crossed eye, to quote a jazz song a figure less than Greek, a hairdo from the early eighties, a shade of lipstick that is the color of Deard Sea mud.
And I prey on them like leach meal. I meet them at cafes or chain coffee houses. We talk of their hopes and aspirations and the possibility that lies ahead. They tell me everything: about their last men, their sexual escapades, how their dreams were shattered, about deaths in the family and I drink it up like an elixir of misery that makes my skin feel electric. It is a hit of schadenfreude that I cannot resist and they want so little in return. An ear that listens, a touch of the hand, someone for once in their life to leave a gracious tip.
We meet, we measure each others’ clothes, bodies, we indulge in fantasy and wonder, and we talk. They do not know I am soaking up their auras, drinking their energy, lapping up their desire and stress and angst. I tell them what they want to hear: how great I am in bed, how I love cleaning the house, that all children should be treated as if they were one’s own. We laugh and joke and sometimes get a little tipsy. We share a cigarette. And then it’s over.
Like the proverbial thief in the night I never contact them again. I become a void, the void that they carry within, the empty space that made them respond to my cleverly crafted ad, and they have only of me a memory. There are so many of these dispossessed souls why meet again? Ah, look at all the lonely people. How the Beatles were so right.
So how does this story end? It really never does. I could tell you that my therapist called, canceling our three o’clock. She has to attend a conference in St. Louis. Touché. I could tell you that she has broken my heart but I would be lying. I could tell you anything you wanted to know and like a fallen angel who just wants to say “I’m sorry” or “fuck you” one last time to his or her God, I will not be there or anywhere and you will feel the great emptiness in which we all live and where I reside. You too like me will become the silence that people drown in after reading a poem.
Philip Kobylarz’s recent work appears or will appear in Connecticut Review, The Iconoclast, Visions International, New American Writing, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Salzburg Review and has appeared in Best American Poetry. His book, Rues, is forthcoming from Blue Light Press of San Francisco.
