Some Things Are Like That

Hard to say but it felt like a direct hit. We were watching TV at the time. Tara said are those fireworks and when we turned to look I heard the sound come, delayed because sound is slower than light, anyone can tell you that but does anyone really know why? Anyway it rippled out and the strange thing was I first thought why didn't the TV go off? Though it was perfectly explainable.

We were all different after that. Tara and I tried to make it work, but I felt so faraway sometimes and she drank too much. Throwing her shoes into the street. Crying as we left the party. I was always running out to save them, one eye on incoming traffic. The other on her. It wasn't her fault; I didn't think of it that way. Every word we put to it changed it into something else.

Some things are like that. Light is has properties of a particle and a wave, but which is it? Both and neither, that's what I've read. It depends on how you look at it. Literally. How. You. Look. At. It.

I like to imagine there were other people there at the time. Maybe Geoff, and he said something that calmed me down, then picked up the phone but the circuits were all busy. Circuits? It sounds so believable, it must be true. He is doing well now, writing daily, not beating his head against the wall, not walking through walls. Balancing the balance.

I am cutting down on things. Less Internet, no porn. If I have to masturbate be very aware of my hands. Don't smoke, don't get unplugged, listen to what my body is saying. They are people's for God's sake. The story goes that John Cage went into a perfectly silent room and came out saying, I heard two noises, one low and one high. The engineer thought about it for a moment and said: the low one was your heart, the high one was your nervous system.

How did he know what a nervous system sounds like? If it is high then those tiny motions make rapidly oscillating waves, just like a tiny speaker. No it is the sound by energy climbing your spine to higher chakras. John says this and I nod. Chakras. First it sounds like a electricity through a radio. He continues. Then your ears adjust and it becomes more like the buzzing of bees. And then crickets, singing at night.

Crickets?

John was there that night, I think. He was the one who turned off the TV, and that in a sense made all the difference. He kept asking, What if we had gone left instead of right? It was all too much to process. Bees and crickets.

Once, when I was fourteen, I walked right instead of straight ahead and nothing has been the same since. It is not like the almost getting hit by a car. Had Tara put the same words together in a different way, I might have felt differently about chasing her shoes into the street. About picking up her scarf. The trick was not to disconnect from the ground floor of reality. To believe there is a ground floor. So I am making resolutions. It is a year of big changes. I have seen lots of sunrises. We watched the sky on New Year's in silence. It felt good to be together. Or maybe I was by myself?